Ultimately, it’s about American imperialism trying to assert hegemony over the international order for the benefit of US capitalism. Russia and China are prime targets for this global assault.

The three unfolding war scenarios are seen in Syria, North Korea and Ukraine. These are not disparate, disassociated conflicts. They are inter-related expressions of the American war plans. War plans which involve the moving of strategic military power into position.

Last week’s massacre of over 100 Syrian government forces by American warplanes near Deir ez-Zor was an audacious overt assault by the US on the Syrian state. The US, along with other NATO allies, have been up to now waging a seven-year proxy war for regime change against Russia’s ally, President Assad. The massacre last week was certainly not the first time that US forces, illegally present in Syria, have attacked the Syrian army. But it seems clearer than ever now that American forces are operating on the overt agenda for regime change. US troops are transparently acting like an occupation army, challenging Russia and its legally mandated support for the Syrian state.

Heightening international concerns are multiple reports that Russian military contractors were among the casualties in the US-led air strike near Deir ez-Zor last week.

Regarding North Korea, Washington is brazenly sabotaging diplomatic efforts underway between the respective Korean leaderships in Pyongyang and Seoul. While this inter-Korean dialogue has been picking up positive momentum, the US has all the while been positioning nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 bombers in the region, along with at least three aircraft carriers. The B-2s are also reportedly armed with 14-tonne bunker-buster bombs – the largest non-nuclear warhead in the American arsenal, designed to destroy North Korean underground missile silos and “decapitate” the Pyongyang leadership of Kim Jong-un.

American vice-president Mike Pence, while attending the Winter Olympics in South Korea, opening last week, delivered a blunt war message. He said that the recent detente between North Korea and US ally South Korea will come to an end as “soon as the Olympic flame is extinguished” – when the games close later this month. This US policy of belligerence completely upends Russia and China’s efforts to facilitate inter-Korean peace diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the situation in Eastern Ukraine looks decidedly grim for an imminent US-led invasion of the breakaway Donbas region. Pentagon military inspectors have in the past week reportedly arrived along the Contact Zone that separates the US-backed Kiev regime forces and the pro-Russian separatists of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Donetsk’s military commander Eduard Basurin warned that the arrival of Pentagon and other NATO military advisors from Britain and Canada indicate that US-armed Kiev forces are readying for a renewed assault on the Donbas ethnic Russian population.

Even the normally complacent observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), charged with monitoring a nominal ceasefire along the Contact Zone, have lately begun reporting serious advancement of heavy weapons by the Kiev forces – in violation of the 2015 Minsk Peace Accord.

If the US-led Kiev forces proceed with the anticipated offensive next month in Donbas there are real fears for extreme civilian casualties. Such “ethnic cleansing” of Russian people by Kiev regime forces that openly espouse Neo-Nazi ideology would mostly likely precipitate a large-scale intervention by Moscow as a matter of humanitarian defense. Perhaps that is what the US planners are wagering on, which can then be portrayed by the dutiful Western news media as “another Russian aggression”.

US-based political analyst Randy Martin says: “It is undeniable that Washington is on a war footing in three global scenarios. Preparation for war is in fact war.”

He added: “You have to also consider the latest Nuclear Posture Review published by the Pentagon earlier this month. The Pentagon is openly declaring that it views Russia and China as targets, and that it is willing to use nuclear force to contest conventional wars and what the Pentagon deems to be asymmetric aggression.”

Martin says that it is not clear at this stage what Washington wants exactly.

“It is of course all about seeking global domination which is long-consistent with American imperialism as expressed for example in the Wolfowitz Doctrine following the end of the Cold War,” says the analyst.

“But what does Washington want specifically from Russia and China is the question. It is evidently using the threat of war and aggression as a lever. But it is not clear what would placate Washington. Perhaps regime change in Russia where President Putin is ousted by a deferential pro-Western figure. Perhaps Russia and China giving up their plans of Eurasian economic integration and abandoning their plans to drop the American dollar in trade relations.”

One thing, however, seems abundantly clear. The US is embarking on a global war plan, as can be discerned from the grave developments unfolding in Syria, the Korean Peninsula and Ukraine. Each scenario can be understood as a pressure point on Moscow or China to in some way acquiesce to American ambitions for global dominance.

To be sure, Washington is being reckless and criminal in its conduct, violating the UN Charter and countless other international laws. It is brazenly acting like a rogue regime without the slightest hint of shame.

Still, Russia and China are hardly likely to capitulate. Simply because the US ambition of unipolar hegemony is impossible to achieve. The post-Second World War order, which Washington was able to dominate for nearly seven decades, is becoming obsolete as the international order naturally transforms into a multipolar configuration.

When Washington accuses Moscow and Beijing of “trying to alter the international order to their advantage” what the American rulers are tacitly admitting is their anxiety that the days of US hegemony are on the wane. Russia and China are not doing anything illegitimate. It is simply a fact of historical evolution.

So, ultimately, Washington’s war plans are futile in what they are trying to achieve by criminal coercion. Those plans cannot reverse history. But, demonically, those plans could obliterate the future of the planet.

The world is again on a precipice as it was before on the eve of the First and Second World Wars. Capitalism, imperialism and fascism are again center stage.

As analyst Randy Martin puts it: “The American rulers are coming out of the closet to show their true naked nature of wanting to wage war on the world. Their supremacist, militarist ideology is, incontrovertibly, fascism in action.”

With petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch paying many of the GOP’s bills these days, it’s no wonder conservative policymakers are pushing hard to protect dirty fossil fuels against competition from clean, renewable energy. But entrepreneurial capitalists whom conservatives claim to worship are fighting back, slashing costs for wind and solar power to the point where few customers can refuse them.

A remarkable new study by Lazard, the venerable New York investment house, concludes that the unsubsidized cost of energy from new wind and solar plants now falls decisively below that of nuclear and coal plants, and even below that of efficient natural-gas-fired generation. The gap is widening each year as scale economies and improvements in turbine and photovoltaic technology drive cost reductions. Significantly, even cautious modelers at the U.S. Department of Energy concede these trends.

Even more disruptive is Lazard’s finding that “in some scenarios the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables-based projects have dropped below the operating costs alone of conventional generation technologies such as coal or nuclear.” In other words, it’s often cheaper to shut down those older plants and replace them with new wind and solar projects.

Where local conditions especially favor renewable energy, the cost advantages of wind and solar have become enormous. Last spring, for example, Tucson Electric Power inked a 20-year deal to purchase enough solar energy to power more than 20,000 homes at a price of less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. (One kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy needed to light ten 100-watt bulbs for an hour.)

That’s just half the cost of new gas and coal generation and about a quarter of the cost of new nuclear power. Only the cheapest wind power can compare.

Trump Fights the Market

Members of the Trump administration, and many Republicans in Congress, are trying to derail the renewable express train.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has called for “rebalancing the market” by issuing federal rules to tilt the playing field in favor of coal and nuclear power. Perry was reportedly influenced by the CEO of Murray Energy, a major coal company that sells much of its product to U.S. utilities whose traditional generating plants are becoming uneconomic.

In an effort to boost profits for coal companies, the Trump administration is also working with Peabody Energy to subsidize continued operation of the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, whose owners voted in February to close the 43-year-old plant. The coal-fired facility has been a major source of air pollution and haze in the Grand Canyon and is the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the nation.

Speaking at a Kentucky Farm Bureau event in October, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said “I would do away with the incentives that we give to wind and solar,” even though current law already schedules most credits to expire by 2020 for wind and 2022 for solar.

Echoing his sentiment, the latest House tax bill guts clean energy tax credits, though the draft version under consideration by the Senate keeps them intact. The Senate’s reluctance reflects the fact that many of the nation’s more than 300,000 jobs in renewable energy production are in heavily Republican states.

As renewable energy costs continue to fall, however, the Trump administration is finding it hard to repeal the laws of supply and demand.

In August, Duke Energy Florida said it was scrapping plans to build a new nuclear plant and would instead double the Sunshine State’s solar capacity as part of a $6 billion program to modernize the state’s power grid and build 500 new electric vehicle charging stations.

Meanwhile, American Electric Power, one of the country’s leading owners of coal-fired plants, announced in July that it is investing $4.5 billion to build the nation’s largest single-site wind project, in western Oklahoma. Beyond that 2,000 megawatt project, AEP has plans to acquire 5,300 megawatts of additional renewable power by 2030 to diversify its power production portfolio and slash carbon emissions.

In a survey this spring of 32 power utilities operating in 26 conservative states, Reuters found only one that said it might prolong the life of its coal-fired units to please the Trump White House.

“The number of utilities betting their futures on renewable energy seems to be growing by the day,” observes the investment website The Motley Fool. “Utilities aren’t investing billions of dollars into renewable energy to save the climate or appease environmentalists, they’re doing so because it’s in their best interest financially. Renewable energy is now the lowest cost option when building new power plants and that’s what’s driving adoption. If these utilities are any indication, there will be tens of billions more poured into the industry over the next decade.”

The same trend is happening globally, as major greenhouse polluters like China and India invest tens of billions of dollars in new solar and wind plants. Even the world’s fossil-fuel capital, Saudi Arabia, is joining the revolution: In October, its power authorities received an astonishingly low bid of only 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for a 300-megawatt project in the north of the kingdom. Unlimited sun and cheap land make solar power the cheapest resource even in the land of oil.

Policy Imperatives

With renewable energy costs in sharp decline, and utilities shifting their investments accordingly, why should we care if President Trump’s team denies the existence of climate change and lauds the future of coal? Because with global carbon emissions still rising, the world must dramatically step up its response if we hope to keep the impact and cost of global warming in check.

“Humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse,” declared a communique by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries published this month in the journal BioScience. “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

To keep overall warming of the planet under 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels — about twice the increase to date — global annual investment in clean energy must triple, according to a major new analysis issued this October by Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy.

As climate activist Bill McKibben told a recent international climate conference in Germany, “If we have any hope of preventing absolute civilization challenge and catastrophe, then we need to be bringing down carbon emissions with incredible rapidity, far faster than it can happen just via normal economic transition.”

In other words, we can’t afford to depend on slow market adjustments. We need continued renewable energy subsidies and new carbon taxes to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy. We need increased investment in customer energy efficiency programs. We need to tackle carbon emissions not just from power plants, but from transportation, industry and agriculture — all potentially greater challenges.

Daunting as that agenda is, we can at least find some comfort in signs — like the new report from Lazard — that market forces are finally lining up to help humanity save itself.

consortiumnews.com

The average person among the richest 80 owns 45,750,000 times as much as does the average person among the lower half. In other words: in terms of wealth, the typical one of those hyper-rich equals nearly 46 million of those poor people.

The richest person among the poor half of humanity owns approximately $5,000, but billions of people in the lower half own less than nothing — they’re negative net worth: owing more than they own. However, whatever they own is visible, and easily seizable, either by creditors, or by thieves.

By contrast, the wealth of all billionaires, including of the top 80, is largely secret, lots of it being in shell companies, many offshore, untraceable. Consequently, estimates of the wealth of the richest 80 individuals are probably unrealistically low. This secretiveness is a major reason why the public tolerates being ruled by an aristocracy: they don’t even recognize that they are — they think they live in a democracy, even if they don’t.

The roughly two thousand known billionaires do lots of business with others in the billionaire class, and with politicians whose careers they fund. And they tend to get what they want in the resulting governmental policies. As for the bottom half of the economic pyramid, even the ‘news’ that the poor read is often produced by the two thousand; and, even when it’s not, whomever does produce it needs to sell ads to these billionaires, which means that it’s necessary to please them in the ‘news’ reports, which the poor, like everyone else, will be reading, and which will be shaping the public’s views, and so will help to determine the politicians whom they vote for (if they vote), which votes will reflect what has come to be ‘known,’ from those ‘news’ reports, and from those ads, which will, in effect, thus be buying ‘their’ government. 

Understanding the way the super-rich function (such as via this secrecy, and via these media) is essential in order to understand history, and even in order to understand the present — and, so, to have realistic insight regarding also the future. Lots of myths are knocked down, along the way (as will here be documented). It’s mind-cleansing, though this might be mere tedium for readers who aren’t interested in cleaning the junk out of their mental attic. But, for those who want to get rid of any mental junk, here’s that clean-out:

Secrecy & tax-evasion:

Just how prevalent the secretiveness of aristocrats is can be estimated from the only study that has been done of how easy it is to hide vast sums of money via shell companies (a popular device amongst the super-rich). This research was originally made available in a basic report published online by the authors, who are three professors of political science — Findley, Nielson and Sharman — and it was finally published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press in a more comprehensive book (containing not just what was in that original paper), titled Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism. The book was reviewed and highly praised at several places.

The book says, on page 72, that, “the findings of this study on the relative compliance of rich nations, poor countries, and tax havens directly contradicts [they meant to say ‘contradict’] the prevailing expectations,” because the rich countries were found to be more corrupt than were the “tax havens” such as Cayman Islands, and than poor countries. They continued: “Tax havens evince superior compliance rates, and developing countries are at least as compliant as developed ones — and in multiple analyses poorer countries demonstrate significantly greater compliance than rich nations.” 

Their bottom-line finding was (p. 73 in the book) “By the broadest measure, the Dodgy Shopping Count, tax havens achieved a score of 25, developing countries 11.9, and rich countries 7.8 (remembering that the higher the score the harder it is to obtain an untraceable shell company and the more effectively the international standards are apparently applied).” Or (as stated in their paper): “it is more than three times harder to obtain an untraceable shell company in tax havens than in developed countries.” 

The US was not only below average in honesty but was probably even worse than the nominal figure, because, as the paper itself noted, "the US number is elevated by the much higher non-response rate from firms in US sample.” In any case, the US, and rich nations in general, have governments that are much more accommodating to tax-cheats than poor countries and especially than tax havens are. Basically, there is non-enforcement against the super-rich and their institutional servants (such as incorporation-firms) in the rich countries. As the paper put this: "One of the biggest surprises of the project was the relative performance of rich, developed states compared with poorer, developing countries and tax havens. … The overwhelming policy consensus, strongly articulated in G20 communiqués and by many NGOs, is that tax havens provide strict secrecy and lax regulation, especially when it comes to shell companies. This consensus is wrong.” The exact opposite was found to be the case: tax-haven countries are especially likely to adhere to all legal requirements, including international requirements.

This study tested business-law firms that serve the very rich, and that especially create corporations in foreign countries — law firms that do substantial business in setting up foreign incorporations. The basic finding was that such firms in wealthy countries are more cooperative with tax-evaders than is the case regarding incorporation-firms in poor countries.

Incorporation firms are not equally “dodgy” in all parts of the United States. Specifically, the “Figure 4: Dodgy Shopping Count by State in the US for all states” showed that, whereas WV, VT, UT, TN, SC, RI, ND, MS, ME, DC, and AK were very strict; NV, DE, MT, SD, WY, NY, TX, PA, CA, and AR, were very lax and were amongst the worst in the world for enforcement against tax-evasion operations. As was explained in the paper, "the principle of a 'risk-based approach,' according to which riskier customers should attract greater scrutiny, is relatively ineffective in screening corrupt customers and only partly effective at thwarting potential terrorists.” (A major concern in the US is to block funding to terrorist organizations such as to Al Qaeda. Most of that funding comes from aristocrats. On 11 February 2015, I headlined “Al Qaeda’s Bookkeeper Spills the Beans,” and reported that the man who had kept Osama bin Laden’s books and who personally collected each of the many multimillion-dollar donations to Al Qaeda, had revealed in sworn court testimony in October 2014, that Arab royals and especially the Saudi royal family had financed Al Qaeda all along, and that the organization was entirely dependent upon their funding, not just for its growth, but for its very existence.) Consequently America’s half-hearted focus on blocking the funding of terrorist organizations has had virtually no impact against the money-laundering by oligarchs or aristocrats in general — the US Government is very accommodating to super-rich tax-cheats; and, so, the enforcement of the law against funding terrorist organizations is being carried out in ways that don’t much inconvenience America’s (or other countries’) billionaires. However, in America, small donors to terrorist organizations are affected.

The predominant types of corruption are very different in rich countries than they are in poor ones. Whereas in poor ones, bribing is the normal mode of corruption, the normal forms in rich countries are campaign finance and tax-evasion — and these happen to be the preferred forms of corruption amongst the very rich, especially in the richer countries. The US Supreme Court, in its 2010 Citizens United decision, said, essentially, that the typical forms of corruption by America’s super-rich are beyond the reach of the law, and that only corruption by the rest of the population can be subjected to effective enforcement in the US They cited the US Constitution as the reason for this, by claiming that political money is “free speech” that’s beyond the reach of the law in the US Thus, only “quid-pro-quo” deals, or outright bribes (the type of thing that’s routine in poor countries), can be prosecuted in the United States. 

The US was found, in the tax-evasion study, to be slightly more corrupt (in terms of government enforcement against tax-evasion) than Mexico, Thailand, and Argentina, but slightly less corrupt than Bahrain, Ukraine, UK, and Chile. (Of course, bribery is probably far more common in nations like Ukraine than in the US; so, the US isn’t necessarily more corrupt than such countries across-the-board.) At the very bottom were Kenya, Canada, Czech Republic, and “US Inc. Services,” meaning US-based business-incorporators that don’t provide other law-services than incorporations. Multi-service law firms have more at stake than just creating new corporations; and, occasionally, the laws concerning corporations and the rich are enforced in the US Whereas incorporation-only firms can risk it, the general-purpose corporate-law firms are less likely to violate the money-laundering and tax-evasion laws.

So: perhaps the richest 80 individuals actually own more than do the bottom 60%, or even than the bottom 70% of people do. Maybe the hidden money amounts to a significant proportion of the real wealth of the top 80; in which case, perhaps the richest 70 persons might own more than the poor half of humanity do.

inherited wealth:

But, even if hidden wealth isn’t such a big factor, there’s another important reason why almost everything is owned by the very few super-rich — or, as I headlined in 2013, "World's Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World's Poorest 68.7%.” (Or, more-simply put: the richest 1% own 14 times more than do the poorest 70%.) Inherited wealth is also a major cause of such wealth-inequality. "Economic mobility into and out of the billionaire class, during the latest ten-year period (2000-2010), is low: only 24% entered or left the class during this decade … . The US was average in that regard, at 23% entering or leaving. Japan was high, at 42% mobility. Canada was extremely low, at only 12% mobility.”

Here is an example of how that works: A new extremely wealthy person in America is Nick Woodman, who is #5 on CNN Money’s “15 Top-Paid CEOs.” His pay this year is $77.4 million, at the company he founded, in 2002 at the age of 26. Wikipedia has said of him, that in 2002 "he decided to travel around the world surfing.” His surfing was a key part of the event that started him on the road to super-wealth. He wanted his friends to take high-quality videos of him surfing, and he decided that there need to be far smaller cameras for making such videos. He thus discovered a market-niche that most non-rich would have been far less likely to discover — even though it’s becoming less and less of a high-end market, and more and more of a mass market for compact HD video cameras. "Woodman and his future wife Jill financed the business by selling shell necklaces they bought in Bali (for $1.90) from their car along the California coast (for $60)[13] combined with $35,000 borrowed from his mother[12][13] and $200,000 borrowed from his father.[4]”

The folksy “shell necklaces” and “from their car” aside, people who are in the bottom 99% really can’t afford to do any of that. But Woodman wasn’t actually in the bottom 99%. "Woodman is the son of Concepcion (née Socarras) and Dean Woodman.[4][5][6][7] His father was a Quaker Christian who co-founded the investment bank Robertson Stephens;[4][8.” That "was a San Francisco-based boutique investment bank that focused primarily on technology companies.” Nick went to private schools, where other rich kids went; so, he met other monied people, from the start, who had friends who also were looking for things to invest in. Such elite “crowd funding” has been common among aristocrats since long before there was any such thing as the Internet. And what, then, was the background of his father, Dean Woodman? Dean went to “one of the oldest preparatory schools in the US.” Furthermore: “he worked in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch including 16 years as director of West Coast corporate financing." So, Dean was well-connected. Nothing was said about Dean’s father (Nick’s grandfather), but most fathers can’t afford to send their children to a prep-school, such as Dean’s father did.

In order to be or become among the richest 80 people, one normally is several generations descended from the first rich ancestor. I once did an analysis of the ten wealthiest individuals on Forbes’s list and found that 7 of them were born to extremely wealthy families; and, in most cases, the original fortune was two or more generations back; the generations since then continued to grow it.

Some of the people in the top 80 are first-generation wealth, but, that’s actually rather rare. The higher one reaches into the billionaire class, the less likely one is to be the founder of a dynasty, and the more likely one is to be an heir — and to have built the family fortune even higher.

Psychopathy:

On 10 January 2014, I headlined "Studies Find That Successful People Tend To Be Bad,” and summarized a number of social-science investigations regarding the question of whether the rich tend to have different values than do the non-rich; and, what they all discovered was that:

“To the extent that a person wants his child to succeed (in the ordinary sense of that term), to rise or stay at the top in social standing, the parent will teach his child not to care about the welfare of others but only of himself, and to do anything or crush anyone in order to win what he wants. The child will be taught that he is entitled to do this because of his inborn superiority, his lineage — not because of anything he does or has done. On the other side, to the extent that a parent encourages a child to care about the welfare of others, or not feel entitled by birth, that parent will reduce the likelihood his child will attain or retain high social standing." 

The richer one is, the more one turns out to be a supremacy-seeker and the less one even really cares any longer about how much money he has — it becomes instead all about rising in the ranking. It becomes all about winning. And so one ignores anybody who isn’t a competitor. If you’re not a competitor, the person sees you only as a potential tool to beat down somebody who is, and therefore everyone is seen either as a friend or as a foe; either you’re this person’s customer, or you’re a competitor’s customer, but your happiness has no intrinsic value to him, only his own winning does. It’s the very meaning of “ruthless.” And that’s the type of people who are found at the very top: they are obsessed with winning, not with doing, and least of all with doing good. They are virtually winning-machines. They are essentially like weapons of war.

Conclusion, & the connection of all this to global warming:

The world is controlled by a very private and very secretive, largely psychopathic, aristocracy. This is ‘the free market,’ in the real world, as opposed to the mythology about it that’s nurtured by the aristocrats (who own almost everything and don’t want the public to know it). Democracy is actually almost non-existent (and it’s already non-existent at the national level in the United States), and it’s become even less existent, as wealth becomes ever-more concentrated. Increasingly, democracy is becoming mythological, instead of any longer being real (if it ever was, anywhere).

So: in broad summary terms, and with that documentation which has just been linked-to here, this is how the aristocracy sustains itself and is increasingly taking up a larger and larger share of the Earth’s wealth (and this “Earth’s wealth” matter is what will get us to the issue of global warming). It’s all being facilitated by secrecy, tax-evasion, inherited wealth, and psychopathy. And all of that is entirely natural. There’s nothing whatsoever unnatural about it. It’s the way things are, as opposed to the mythology that’s peddled — and long has been peddled — about wealth, and about government. 

It’s just more of the same, more of what’s been going on already for thousands of years. 

The only difference is that, now, in the developed world, things are getting worse instead of better for average people; and, in the developing world, things won’t be able to continue getting better unless fossil-fuel use gets cut back globally and fast and drastically, so that stranded fossil-fuel assets become written-off — which the developed world’s aristocracies oppose and propagandize against (for example, see this about two American brothers, each one of whom is high among the world’s 80 wealthiest individuals, and together they run a US political operation that receives contributions from many of the others). 

US President Barack Obama’s only major achievement during his two terms in office was his cooperating with Chinese President Xi Jinping to produce, on 12 December 2015, the Paris Agreement to constrain global warming. The final barrier to be overcome had been the insistence by poorer countries that use coal to continue it during a transition period, and the insistence by richer countries to prohibit that different treatment and to demand that China, India, etc., be treated no differently than rich countries (which had already largely transitioned away from coal). The lower-income nations were expecting the higher-income ones to help them to transition, and Obama had first given ground regarding that on 15 November 2014, at the start of the Brisbane G20 Summit. So, his only major achievement was actually a two-step process. The big question now is the extent to which US President Donald Trump will cooperate with all the rest of the world on that. Thus far, he is acting like such a psychopath that he is the lone hold-out now publicly opposing the Paris Agreement. That’s as extreme as can be.

The fate of the world could thus end up depending upon whether America’s aristocrats, who have until now been strongly against writing-off fossil fuels, suddenly switch away from that “Drill, baby, drill!” position. But turning away from it could destroy the Republican Party. How likely is it that Republicans would switch on this? It would require the Republican Party to abandon its laissez faire, anti-regulatory, ideology. That has always been the basic ideology of the aristocracy, throughout the world (because regulation reduces especially the freedom of aristocrats). What, then, would remain of the Republican Party? Even if this happened, could it happen in time to prevent runaway global-warming (if that hasn’t already been set into motion)?

The aristocracy have always controlled most of the world’s resources. But now they are faced with concerns about future generations in a way that they never were before. If they don’t fundamentally change their mode of thinking, then very hot times are ahead, and even their own heirs won’t be entirely spared the negative consequences. Not even the gated compounds and island retreats will be immune to this revolution, because it will be a revolution of nature — not, like in 1848 Europe — a mere revolt by the masses of people.

There are no historical precedents for this. The future won’t necessarily be a brave new world, but it will be a new world, one fundamentally different from past history. All bets are off. There is no basis on which to project intelligently, concerning this. Only ignorant gambles are possible. However, if past history is any guide at all, then the winners of those ignorant gambles will likely declare themselves to have been sages, for having predicted ‘wisely’ how these coin-tosses would turn out. Perhaps whatever people might happen to survive will then say that those aristocrats had been chosen by God, or the gods. And, so, the basic myth will be continuing, until everything burns out.

Or, as Shakespeare, through his Macbeth, more realistically, said of everything:

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

And, then, it’s suddenly gone.

And all that many billions of poor people will have to show for it is the misery they had suffered in obscurity while kings such as Macbeth had “strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage.” Because, their “hour” never even came.

Global warming seems to have become the excuse for everything unusual in the weather. If it rains that is because of global warming. If it does not rain that is because of global warming. And not so long ago global cooling was a major concern.

No one can deny that global warming is occurring now — the retreat of the glaciers is one obvious proof. And that an increase in coal/hydrocarbon emissions is the likely cause. But some of the experts also point to changes in sea currents. One theory even claims the melt water from the Arctic could block the Gulf Stream and send much of northern Europe back to another ice age. Only a change in the El Nino current in the Pacific Ocean can explain the recent torrential downpours in Pacific coast Latin America, though the current change could be due to ocean water heating.

Certainly something unusual must have happened to the ocean currents to create the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th century. Something even more unusual must have happened in past ages to allow elephants to roam the jungles of Scotland. Climate changes were occurring long before the steam engine and the automobile.

Then there is the argument put forward by Russian scientist Yuliya Latynina, namely that back in geologic times (the Devonian era especially) the world’s atmosphere carried much higher levels of carbon than now (which is why jungles flourished in Scotland). That carbon was soaked up by the jungles to create the coal and oil deposits which we are slowly burning off now as we return to an older norm.

That does not make life easier for those of us today suffering from excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But it does help make us realize we are looking at a natural phenomenon, and not something devised by the devil.

The pluses of a warmer planet

In any case we need to be more sober about the consequences. Much of the warming debate seems focused on the potential damage from flooding in coastal areas as the sea level rises, in the Pacific islands especially. But there could be warming pluses as well — the potential for enormous agricultural gains to Canada, northern Europe and Russia, and not just the fact they can now grow wine-producing grapes in England.

According to the Financial Times: “Russia is about to become the world’s biggest wheat exporter for the first time. The country is forecast to overtake other contenders with exports of 30 million tons thanks to a bumper harvest. The EU, last year’s leader, has fallen off the perch hit by a sharp decline in French production, while the United States has seen its position eroded over the past few years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.” And: “Russian agriculture sector flourishes amid sanctions.”

Imagine how much of the global food shortage, and the sanctions impost, would be overcome if this enormous area would continue to increase grain and dairy production. That gain exceeds any amount of loss of coconut production in Pacific islands threatened by rising sea levels.

The alarmist global-warming literature used to make much of the claims that the melting of the Siberian permafrost bogs would release great amounts of methane into the atmosphere. That may still be a problem. But is it better for mankind if those bogs remain there forever? Besides, I also find a grudging counterargument in the literature — that the return of these areas to permanent pasture may cut methane emissions.

Other arguments say warming will reduce the life of the ice roads in northern Canada, or that the melting of the permafrost will move foundations, cut pipelines, etc. But that is not the end of the world. The Canadians can build all-weather roads. In Irkutsk they manage to survive in buildings tilting five or more degrees. In Holland they spend much of their lives below sea level.

Rather than the evils of global warming the debate should focus on how to supply the world’s energy needs without polluting the atmosphere. For a long time the emphasis was on nuclear energy, and rightly. It is the ideal nonpolluting energy source. The Chinese and the French seem able to expand their nuclear energy supply without problems — the French to the point where they are important suppliers to nuclear allergic nations, Germany especially. Where there have been accidents, they seem due mainly to gross human error — precisely in the nations prone to such errors, Japan, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Surely that is something that can be avoided, in Japan especially.

Nuclear power yes, Japan no

Prior to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I spent several years on Japan’s various nuclear safety commissions and groups. The technical ability of the industry was beyond doubt. What worried me constantly was the inability — cultural it seemed — to engage in contingency planning. As one official close to the industry put it, if you think of hypothetical accidents, you will encourage them to occur. Bad karma.

In the wake of Fukushima we are discovering that there were warnings of a devastating tsunami. The people in charge just ignored them. More bad karma?

But the anti-contingency allergy went beyond tsunami. A still largely ignored Fukushima factor was that the highly predictable earthquake induced the collapse of pylons bringing in emergency electricity from outside. Even the much praised Onagawa plant close to the epicenter only survived because one of its six pylons remained intact.

The other destructive cultural factor I saw close up was the refusal to allow contrary opinions. The anti-nuclear people in Japan include some with expertise. To have allowed them free access to all nuclear plants (as I proposed) would almost certainly have led to warning bells about electricity-supply dangers. But they were seen as the enemy. My ideas about treating them as possible advisers were dismissed out of hand. It was Japanese factionalism at its worst. Ditto for my advice that the industry should encourage whistleblowers.

Nor were they very interested in efforts to tell them that the problem-plagued and highly expensive efforts to reprocess and use spent nuclear fuel (Rokkasho, Monju) were also unnecessary. They just repeated the mantra that the world was about to run out of uranium. Nor were they impressed when I told them how on Canberra’s Cabinet resource committee I had discovered that Australia had so much uranium that it was restricting exploration for fear of flooding world markets and collapsing prices. The bureaucrats were determined to turn Japan into a world nuclear power and that was that.

Later I was to find the same hubris when I was appointed to the commission to have the world locate in Japan its first fusion- power experiment plant, even through France was the obvious choice.

Whether nuclear fission or fusion power, both should be no-nos in a nation like Japan where it is so easy for bureaucratic sludge rather than technical expertise to rise to the top in any organization under state control. I have seen the same during my long years in Japan’s education industry.

Fortunately, for Japan at least, pure economics are now moving the sustainable energy debate away from nuclear to solar, geothermal and even wind-based sources. Solar has the added advantage of providing a use for Japan’s abandoned farm land. Or so you would think. But sure enough the farm bureaucrats are in there still telling us they have to maintain the land use restrictions imposed back in the days when Japan was supposed to be running out of farmland. It never ends.

japantimes.co.jp

With the wide path of destruction that Donald Trump has been cutting — in which the damage is affecting matters ranging from principles of nondiscrimination to ethical integrity of government officials to reliable health care for Americans — it is easy to lose sight of what ultimately would be the most consequential destruction of all: the damage to a habitable planet.

The consequences may not be as immediately apparent, during the first 100 days or even during four years, as some of the other carnage, but the importance to humanity is even greater. As with many other Trump policies, it is not yet clear exactly what the administration will do regarding a specific initiative such as the Paris accord on climate change, but the overall thrust of opposing any serious effort to retard global warming is all too obvious.

The recent demonstrations known as the march for science, although ostensibly not aimed at any one leader, were a salutary expression of concern, given that denial of climate change and the associated opposition against efforts to slow global warming represent one of the most glaring rejections of science, right along with the Seventeenth Century inquisition of Galileo. The rejection is of a piece with Trump’s contempt for truth on most any topic.

It is hard to know what goes through the minds of the climate change deniers and skeptics that Trump has installed in his administration. Most likely they are smart enough to know better but are playing out an appallingly selfish, politically narrow-minded, and short-sighted approach toward what sort of world will be left to their children and grandchildren. This is suggested by some of their contrived verbal formulations.

For example, Scott Pruitt, to whom Trump has given the job of presiding over the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency, says, ”I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do…” Who’s talking about “precision”? That’s a false standard.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is a major, and probably the major, contributor to what is highly consequential global warming, even if the exact effects cannot be measured or predicted with “precision.”

The posture assumed on this issue by the likes of Trump and Pruitt is highly irresponsible. The Washington Post editorial page puts it aptly: “Children studying [Trump’s] presidency will ask, ‘How could anyone have done this?’ ”

The Why of Climate Denial

Contempt and disdain are proper attitudes to adopt toward the climate change deniers, including the ones in the current administration. They should be shamed either for displaying such inexcusable ignorance or, what is even worse, for displaying selfishness and short-sightedness despite knowing better.

A poster that comic artist Walt Kelly prepared for the first Earth Day in 1970

But that is not enough. And the problem goes far beyond Donald Trump. It extends to much of the Republican Party. As the Post editorialists observe, the GOP is “a once-great American political party embracing rank reality-denial.” James Inhofe was throwing snowballs in the Senate well before Trump was elected.

A savvy response to the deniers is to point out some of the more immediately visible economic and political consequences of the destructive approach toward climate change that the current administration has embraced. One should point out how not being in the forefront of developing renewable energy sources represents regression, not progress, for the U.S. economy, no matter how much false hope is given to Appalachian coal miners about getting jobs back. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a prominent political leader who commendably is adding his influential voice to this subject.

One also should point out how the Trump administration’s degenerate posture on energy and climate change isolates the United States internationally. The posture makes the United States an object of disdain for taking a Dark Ages approach toward an issue in which, more than any other, everyone in the world has a stake. Anyone in the United States who professes to care about U.S. leadership in the world ought to be concerned about this, regardless of attitudes about atmospheric science.

The loss of U.S. leadership is especially evident in comparison with the other of the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases: China. Although several years ago China had a backward view of the issue of climate change, seeing it as a Western excuse for trying to retard China’s economy — a notion that Donald Trump would later adopt in the reverse direction by describing climate change as a Chinese “hoax” — Beijing is now making a concerted effort to do something about the problem.

China may have already passed, as of four years ago, its peak use of coal. There are no signs that the Trump administration’s back-sliding on the issue has lessened China’s commitment to take a progressive and responsible path on the matter.

Besides revamping its own energy structure, China has become a global leader on the issue. And besides being persuaded by the scientific research that describes how vulnerable China is to damage from climate change, Beijing also sees its progressive posture on the subject as a further way to exercise soft power in the sense of international influence.

Trump’s retrograde attitude toward many aspects of the international order that have served the United States well has already meant surrendering much global leadership to China. His backward attitude on climate change means surrendering still more.

consortiumnews.com

Bannon was brought into a major scientific experiment in 1994 as its «Acting CEO» to find a way that would avoid the experiment’s earlier finding that within a hundred years (i.e., by approximately 2095) this planet will be virtually uninhabitable unless global warming can and will quickly be reversed. 

At that time, on 13 January 1995, Bannon was explaining the problem. He wasn’t saying that the experiment’s prior findings had been that death would result, but instead casually discussed those findings, vaguely suggesting that they might have been mere computer simulations, which they weren’t. The lead-in to him was at 2:00 in the video, where Bernd Zabel, Director, Biospheric Operations, speaks: «[This experiment] gives us the power to measure what happens, like air pollution, different CO₂; we can measure here, instead of waiting generations, you can measure that over a six-month period».

Bannon’s voice then is heard, explaining:

«What a lot of the scientists who are studying global change, and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in a hundred years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today [which atmosphere the experiment soon confirmed to be impossible for life to continue, no way to avoid this conclusion]. We have [in a hundred years]extraordinarily high CO₂, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane, we have lower oxygen [which gas is, of course, essential for humans] content, and so the power of this place [the hermetically sealed domed-in area] is allowing those scientists who are involved in studying global change, and which in the outside world [outside of their dome] really had to do with computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2, and other greenhouse gases, on humans, plants». 

What he ultimately found there, in «Biosphere 2», was that no way exists to avoid the conclusion that that assessment he described (planetary death) would be the result of not reversing global warming; so, the entire operation was terminated. 

Here’s why it was terminated with no announcement of its devastating finding:

The financier who owned it, Ed Bass, was an oil billionaire and one of the Bass Brothers who soon was (along with his brothers, all of them relatives of the oil tycoon Sid Richardson) to be catapulting George W. Bush into the White House as the #1 global-warming denier (something crucially valuable to the oil-and-gas companies — especially in the U.S. White House).

Ed Bass knew that if he could scientifically establish that global warming would actually not be bad for life on Earth, then his hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar gamble on financing this experiment would return far more than that in PR income from other oil-and-gas companies. Ultimately, he spent $200 million on it before abandoning the experiments. It was a lot of money, even for that billionaire.

Biosphere 2’s calculations from its earlier experimental data had predicted that the plants and animals (including humans) wouldn’t survive without drastic reductions in global-warming gases. Bannon was now the CEO of Biosphere 2, running actually a second and more rigorously controlled round of experiments there, to determine with more certainty what the result would actually be of doing nothing about global warming. 

The conditions he described in the video were what the financier was hoping that the new controlled experiment would disprove. (With the lowered oxygen-content, and the far higher nitrous oxide and the high methane, humans could not exist, and fires would rage uncontrollably in global burning, which would lower the planet’s oxygen-content even more.)

The finding of Biosphere 2 turned out to be the contrary to that hope, which was the hope of all the carbon-fuels industries; and, so, the entire Biosphere operation was terminated and nothing was published from it. (That’s similar to what the sugar-industry did with the ‘scientific’ research that they had financed, and what the tobacco-industry did, and what the GMO industry did, and what all industries do: they cherry-pick what they submit for ‘scientific’ publication, and so make ‘science’ a mere handmaiden to propaganda.)

The experiment had been introduced to the public as if it were testing human survival in interplanetary travel. Thus, it was called «Space Biosphere Ventures». This way, if it failed to obtain the desired result — which is what happened — it could simply be described as having been an unsuccessful experiment pertaining to space-travel.

That’s the way the news media reported, and still discuss, it. Even today, Wikipedia, and even ecological sites, give the oil-and-gas industries’ cover-story about it, as if describing it this way were a historical account of the matter; and as if this type of institutional ‘science’ (selective publication and non-publication of scientific studies that are financed by interests which have a financial stake in their outcomes) constitutes real science; the myths thus go on — and so lead us to an «End Times» that will actually result from a denial of science, a mere aping of science. Corrupt ‘science’ is no science at all. It’s just a form of PR. It is a variant of religion (manipulated and faith-based mass-beliefs — mass-propaganda), not of science, at all. Why did even environmental organizations have no curiosity about an oil billionaire’s financing such a costly study of human survival during space-travel? That cover-story they didn’t think to be at all fishy?

In the period 1991-1995, Ed Bass spent 200 million dollars on this, which was the first-ever series of increasingly rigorously controlled experiments employing a hermetically sealed miniature — a miniaturized physical, instead of merely a computerized, model — of Earth’s biological-and-physical ecosystem. He did it in order to find out whether this planet’s ecosystem will improve, decline, or end, if the growth of carbon gases continues on its existing course. Planetary death within a hundred years was found, and therefore the myth continues that these experiments were about space-travel and came to no conclusion; the cover-story prevails, history is suppressed. Myths prevail this way.

The likelihood is practically nil that President-elect Trump hasn’t been informed about the actual fact by his chief strategist, who played the key role in the final round of these experiments. Bannon clearly described there the atmospheric issues that were being examined, and they all pertained to global ‘warming’. He was overseeing the ultimate physical-and-biological test about this matter, which is of such crucial interest to oil-and-gas billionaires.

For a realistic hopeful interpretation of the future Trump Presidency, see this.

At the present moment, I myself am on the fence about Trump’s Presidency. The best sense I can make of the current situation, and my chief worry about it, is actually even shorter-term than global burning, and it’s that the Trumpians don’t understand the war between Sunni Islam, led by Saudi Arabia, versus Shiite Islam, led by Iran, and that they therefore don’t recognize that America is on the wrong side of this — we’re partnered with, and against, the wrong people, in Islam’s global war. Iran isn’t and never was America’s enemy; America, ever since overthrowing Iran’s progressive democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and replacing him with a fascist dictatorship, has been Iran’s enemy. All the aggression in U.S.-Iranian relations has actually been on America’s side (which ended up producing in 1979 — as «blowback» against America’s Dulles-brothers fascism — the fundamentalist-Shiite takeover of Iran’s government). By contrast, 9/11 was a Saudi operation. Fundamentalist-Sunni aggression against the U.S. is clear. The U.S. under Trump should gradually build toward an official U.S. apology to the Iranian people (but the Sauds and Thanis and Sabahs, and other fundamentalist-Sunni aristocrats, would be outraged against that, because they lead this fascism and rely upon the U.S. aristocracy to protect them and their regimes). This U.S.-fascist 1953 coup was America’s original sin. It still poisons world affairs. Trump’s Presidency will fail if he fails to understand this basic fact of recent history.

The brilliant pseudonymous journalist and news-commentator «Tyler Durden» posted at his «Zero Hedge» site on November 19th «War Breaks Out Between Neo-Cons And Libertarians Over Trump's Foreign Policy», and described in a thoroughly unbiased way the Trumpians’ internal conflict. To boil it down: the «Neo-Cons» want to reduce President Trump’s focus against jihadists, and increase his focus against both Iran and Russia. (Congressional Democrats are, like congressional Republicans, overwhelmingly in the «Neo-Con» camp, though they don’t refer to themselves as being «neoconservatives», nor any other type of «conservatives». Hillary Clinton herself was strongly neoconservative though she never said so publicly.)

Unlike the issue of global burning (euphemistically called ‘warming’), Trump is probably ignorant of the issue of U.S.-Iranian relations, and of the global war between Sunni and Shiite Islam. Whether he will act in accord with either understanding (global burning, and/or our wrong alliances and wars) remains still unclear. But at least in regards to global burning, he almost certainly understands the truth: given that his chief strategist is Stephen Bannon, Trump would have to be an idiot not to. Whatever he might say or do about global burning, he can reasonably be presumed to know the truth about that matter.

The final Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) proposed treaty would leave each signatory nation liable to be sued by any international corporation that objects to any new regulation, or increase in regulation, regarding climate change, otherwise known as global warming. In no terminology is that phenomenon even so much as just mentioned in the “Environment” chapter. Regarding labor issues, including slavery, the “Labour” chapter of the TPP contains merely platitudes. (Obama allowed Malaysia into the compact despite its notoriously poor record of non-enforcement of its ban on slavery, because he wants the U.S. to control the Strait of Malacca in order to impede China’s economic and military expansion; it’s part of Obama’s anti-China policy. Almost everything that he does has different motives than the ones his rhetoric claims.) Throughout, the treaty would place international corporations in ever-increasing control over all regulations regarding workers’ rights, the environment, product safety, and consumer protection. But the environmental and labor sections are particularly blatant insults to the public — a craven homage to the top stockholders in international corporations. The world’s richest 80 people own the same amount of wealth as the world’s bottom 50%; and Obama represents those and other super-rich and their friends and servants in the lobbying and other associated industries. But he also represents the even richer people who aren’t even on that list, such as King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the world’s richest person. It’s people such as that who will be the real beneficiaries of Obama’s ‘trade’ treaties. The public will be harmed, enormously, wherever these treaties become law. 

The full meaning of the terms that are set forth in the TPP agreement won’t be publicly known for at least four years, but the explicit terms that were made public on November 5th, and that will be presented to the 12 participating nations for signing, are entirely consistent with what had been expected on the basis of wikileaks and other earlier published information.

The 12 participating nations are: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Three countries were excluded by U.S. President Obama, because the U.S. doesn’t yet control them and they are instead viewed as being not allied with the main axis of U.S. international power: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel. Those three outright-excluded countries are Russia, China, and India. (India, of course, has hostile relations with Pakistan, which is Sunni and therefore part of the Saudi-Qatar-Turkey portion of the U.S. international core, basically the Sunni portion of the core. By contrast, Russia and China have been determinedly independent of the U.S., and are therefore treated by President Obama as being hostile nations: he wants instead to isolate them, to choke off their access to markets, as much as possible. This same motivation also factored largely in his coup to take control of Ukraine, through which Russia’s gas passes on its way into the EU, the world’s largest gas-market.)

6 nations that Obama had invited into the TPP were ultimately unwilling to accept Obama’s terms and so were excluded when the final text was published: Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia.

The phrases “global warming” and “climate change” don’t appear anywhere in the entire TPP document, nor does “climate” nor “warming” — it’s an area that’s entirely left to international corporations in each one of the separate participating nations to assault as much as they wish in order to gain competitive advantage against all of the other corporations that operate in the given nation: i.e., something for each corporation to sacrifice in order to be able to lower the given company’s costs. That raises its profit-margin. This also means that if any international corporation claims to be subjected in any participating nation, to global-warming regulation or enforcement which poses a barrier or impediment to that corporation’s profits, then that corporation may sue that given nation, and fines might be assessed against that nation (i.e., against its taxpayers) for such regulation or enforcement. National publics are no longer sovereign.

The “Labour” chapter is a string of platitudes, such as, “Article 19.7: Corporate Social Responsibility: Each Party shall endeavor to encourage enterprises to voluntarily adopt corporate social responsibility initiatives on labour issues that have been endorsed or supported by that Party.”

President Obama’s Trade Representative, his longtime personal friend Michael Froman, organized and largely wrote Obama’s proposed trade treaties: TPP for the Pacific, and TTIP and TISA for the Atlantic. Froman told the AFL-CIO and U.S. Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder labor-union organizers, it’s no violation of workers’ rights — nothing that’s of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country’s international trade policies or the enforcement of them. On 22 April 2015, Huffington Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these treaties, bannered “AFL-CIO’s Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation,” and Michael McAuliff reported that, “Defenders of the White House push for sweeping trade deals argue they include tough enforcement of labor standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such claims Tuesday, revealing that [Obama] administration officials have said privately that they don’t consider even the killings of labor organizers to be violations of those pacts.” 

In other words: This is, and will be, the low level of the playing-field that U.S. workers will be competing against in TPP etc., just as it is already, in the far-smaller existing NAFTA (which Hillary Clinton had helped to pass in Congress during the early 1990s). (Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, all campaigned for the Presidency by attacking Republicans for pushing such ‘trade’ deals. Their actions when they gain power, contradict their words. America and virtually the entire world has become rule of a suckered public, by perhaps as many as a thousand psychopathic aristocrats who own the international corporations and ‘news’ media, and who regularly do business with each other though they wall themselves off from the public. Typically, at their level, it makes no real difference which country their passport is from.) “Trumka said that even after the Obama administration crafted an agreement to tighten labor protections four years ago, some 105 labor organizers have been killed, and more than 1,300 have been threatened with death.” The Obama Administration is ignoring the tightened regulations that it itself had managed to get nominally implemented on paper. “Pressed for details about Trumka’s assertion that murder doesn’t count as a violation of labor rules, Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff, told HuffPost that USTR officials said in at least two meetings where she was present that killing and brutalizing organizers would not be considered interfering with labor rights under the terms of the trade measures.” Furthermore: “’We documented five or six murders of Guatemalan trade unionists that the government had failed to effectively investigate or prosecute,’ Lee said. ‘The USTR told us that the murders of trade unionists or violence against trade unionists was not a violation of the labor chapter.’” That U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, is the same person Obama has negotiating with foreign governments, and with international corporations, both Obama’s TPP, and his TTIP & TISA.

The most important chapter in the TPP treaty is “Dispute Settlement,” which sets forth the means by which corporations will sue countries for alleged violations of their stockholders ‘rights’ to extract profits from operations of those corporations in the signatory countries. The underlying assuption here is that the rights of international stockholders take precedence over the rights (even over the sovereignty  rights) of the citizens of any participating country.

Instead of these suits being judged according to any nation’s laws, they are allowed to be addressed only by means of private arbitration “Panels.” The Dispute Settlement chapter contains “Article 28.9: Composition of Panels.” Section #1 there is simply: “The panel shall comprise three members.” Each of the two Parties will appoint a member; one for the suing corporation, and the other for the sued nation; and both of those members will then jointly select a third member “from the roster established pursuant to Article 28.10.3”; and this third member will automatically “serve as chair.” Article 28.10.3 says that anyone who possesses “expertise or experience in law, international trade, other matters covered by this Agreement, or the resolution of disputes arising under international trade agreements” may be selected for the roster, so long as the individual meets vague criteria such as that they “be independent of, and not be affiliated with or take instructions from, any Party.” No penalty is laid out for anyone on the roster who lies about any of that. Basically, anyone may become a person on the roster, even non-lawyers may, and even corrupt individuals may, especially because there are no penalties for anyone on the roster, none at all is stated.

Then, “Article 28.19,” section 8: “If a monetary assessment is to be paid to the complaining Party, then it shall be paid in U.S. currency, or in an equivalent amount of the currency of the responding Party or in another currency agreed to by the disputing Parties.” There is no appeals-process. If a nation gets fined and yet believes that something was wrong with the panel’s decision, there is no recourse. No matter how much a particular decision might happen to have been arrived at in contradiction of that nation’s laws and courts and legal precedents, the panels’ decisions aren’t appealable in any national legal system. Whatever precedents might become established from these panels’ subsequent record of decisions will constitute no part of any nation’s legal system, but instead create an entirely new forming body of case-law in an evolving international government which consists of international corporations and their panelists, and of whatever other panelists are acceptable to those corporate panelists. Voters have no representation, they’re merely sued. Stockholders have representation, they do the suing, of the various nations’ taxpayers, for ‘violating’ the ‘rights’ of stockholders.

The roster of authorized panelists available to be chosen by any corporation’s panelists in conjunction with by any nation’s panelists, is customarily composed of individuals who move back and forth between government and private-sector roles, through a “revolving door,” so that on both ends of that, the ultimate control is with the owners of the controlling blocs of stock in various international corporations. This is the newly evolving world government. It will not block any nation from legislating protections of workers, or of consumers, or of the environment; it will simply hold a power to extract from any participating nation’s taxpayers fines for ‘violating’ the ‘rights’ of stockholders in international corporations. Citizens will increasingly be held under the axe, and the top stockholders in international corporations will be holding it. This isn’t the type of world government that was anticipated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, the founders of the U.N., and by the other early (pre-1954) proponents of world government. But, since 1954, the plans for this anti-democratic form of emerging world government were laid; and, now, those plans are the ones that are being placed into effect.

Thus, on 26 October 2015, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, the international legal expert Alfred de Zayas, headlined, “UN expert calls for abolition of Investor-State dispute settlement arbitrations.” That’s the system, otherwise called “ISDS,” which already exists in a few much smaller international-trade treaties, and which is now being introduced on the largest scale ever in TPP and in Obama’s other proposed treaties. The U.N. press release, calling for its “abolition” or explicit outlawing, said: 

“In his fourth report to the UN General Assembly, Mr. de Zayas focuses on the adverse human rights impacts of free trade and investment agreements and calls for the abolition of Investor-State dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) that accompanies most of these agreements.

“Over the past twenty-five years bilateral international treaties and free trade agreements with investor-state-dispute-settlement have adversely impacted the international order and undermined fundamental principles of the UN, State sovereignty, democracy and the rule of law. It prompts moral vertigo in the unbiased observer,” he noted.

“Far from contributing to human rights and development, ISDS has compromised the State’s regulatory functions and resulted in growing inequality among States and within them,” the expert stated.”

Earlier, on 5 May 2015, I headlined, “UN Lawyer Calls TTP & TTIP ‘a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots’.” I close now by repeating the opening of that report:

The Obama-proposed international-trade deals, if passed into law, will lead to “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots,” says Alfred De Zayas, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order.

These two mammoth trade-pacts, one (TTIP) for Atlantic nations, and the other (TTP) for Pacific nations excluding China (since Obama is against China), would transfer regulations of corporations to corporations themselves, and away from democratically elected governments. Regulation of working conditions and of the environment, as well as of product-safety including toxic foods and poisonous air and other consumer issues, would be placed into the hands of panels whose members will be appointed by large international corporations. Their decisions will remove the power of democratically elected governments to control these things. “Red tape” that’s imposed by elected national governments would be eliminated — replaced by the international mega-corporate version.

De Zayas was quoted in Britain’s Guardian on May 4th as saying also that, “The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated,” because they would vastly harm publics everywhere, even though they would enormously benefit the top executives of corporations by giving them control as a sort of corporate-imposed world government, answerable to the people who control those corporations.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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