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Quite a formula the oligarchs have developed :
Want to repeal democratic regulation of the environment, health & safety regulations, labor law, financial regulations, etc, but think it's too much of a stretch (even post-Citizens United) to get bills that (openly and directly) advocate repealing these laws through Congress, the states, and local governments, or that some pesky court might actually rule in favor of the people?
Here's the ticket:
Do an end run around the whole dang process:
(1) First, propose a "regulatory takings" legal concept that presumes corporations have the legal right to anticipated profits from anything they might want to do, and demand that any democratic government that passes any law that reduces these anticipated profits pay the corporation for "losses". (Sure beats making money the old-fashioned way: coming up with "better mousetraps" is work!)
(2) If the courts don't give you every last thing you want via the "takings" philosophy, then proceed to Step 2: Bundle all the individual de-regulations into one package.
(3) Label the package a "trade agreement", & negotiate it with foreign nations.
(4) Get your pals appointed "trade" negotiators.
(5) Make sure the negotiations are categorized as "classified".
(6) Get Congress to cede, in advance, their authority to do anything beyond 2 options: Either rubber-stamp the "trade agreement", or reject the entire bill, in which case get your pals in the media to label them as "obstructing progress" because they are "impractical", "emoprog" "purists" who "want everything". including "ponies". . . . . . Get your pals in the media to say that since it's a "trade" agreement, it needs the same deference to the executive branch as do negotiations about Iranian nuclear deals, and not the open debate and amendment powers which Congress has when debating changes in environment law, financial regulations, health and safety regulations, labor law. . . (Pretty slick, eh?)
(7) If any pesky Congress people want access to the particulars of negotiations before they cede their authority, make sure the language is complex and opaque so that the actual impact is difficult to assess without detailed study and consultation with experts, so, whatever you do, DON'T give them, or let them make, copies. Moreover, DON'T let them take notes. Take away their cameras or cell phones. Threaten them with national security violations if they discuss actual details with the public or press.
And here's some extra bonuses:
(1) Throw in expansion/extension of intellectual property monopoly terms. (Those Asian generic manufacturers need to busy themselves with outsourced manufacturing of BRAND-NAME drugs, not actually COMPETING with us! . . . And getting rid of Fair Use can do to the internet what getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine did to those pesky "liberal" commentators!)
(2) And, how about this: Finance it with automatic cuts to Medicare!
(3) And, just in case some pesky courts decide to interfere, establish an extrajudicial system immune from judicial review. Call them "Investor-State Dispute Resolution" tribunals. make their decisions exempt from appeal to any court, by virtue of entering to agreement with foreign governments.
Now, how's that for a slick package?
Who says we can't have it all?
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... and went to the World Bank, where he was chief economist until he was fired for expressing dissent with its policies. ( The Bank's External Affairs department told the press that Stiglitz had not been fired, his post had merely been abolished.)
When Stiglitz talks about a corporate takeover, looks like he knows what he is talking about.
Look at what Barrick Gold, one of Poppy Bush's favorite charities, did to The Guardian and Greg Palast, for telling the truth, including the bits about the buried alive gold miners, as it happens. So, the Big Corporation sued and sued and sued. With their deep pockets, they can buy justice, judges, prime ministers, presidents and whoever and whatever else they need to turn a buck.
Their crime? Telling the truth.
Poppy Strikes Gold
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast
EXCERPT...
And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.
The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.
They could well afford it. [font color="green"]In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka![/font color]
Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.
Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.(1) There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company's International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/
Wow. So his flock of supporters in the media and elsewhere wanted it known: George Herbert Walker Bush did do something nice when he was President. It just happened to be that it was for a rich, powerful corporation.
The story continues, in which Mr. Palast details how said gold mining company employed fascist tactics to take over the mine, part of which involved bulldozing the miners homes and mines, some with the miners still inside. Let that, uh, sink in. For his trouble in reporting the story, Barrick threatened to sue.
The Truth Buried Alive
—By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)
Source: UTNE Reader
April 2003 Issue
EXCERPT...
Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, [font color="red"]I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can’t otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.(1)[/font color]
Panicked, the Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)
The Goldfingers didn’t stop there. [font color="green"]Barrick’s lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over Web publications of my story in America, because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights.[/font color] Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. Web site, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the Internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.
And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.
I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation’s president asking for an investigation–instead, Lissu’s law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu’s sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims’ families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the “Ralph Nader of Canada”, head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference–and in August tipped the story to the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national paper.
CONTINUED...
http://www.mapcruzin.com/palast-2.htm
It's getting harder and harder for a man without a corporation to be heard these days. Perhaps one day no one will wonder why so few people remember democracy. The People will know penury, however -- a fate worse than death for the rich, life for greater and greater numbers of humanity.
