Jack Rabbit
Jack Rabbit's JournalI don't want a way for artificial persons to make an end run around democatic governments
and cry to an unelected panel of corporate shysters when they don't realize expected profits (a benefit it could reasonably have expected to accrue to it . . . is being nullified or impaired as a result of the application of a measure of another Party that is not inconsistent with this Agreement). That is the gist of Chapter 28.
The other matters can be addressed without this horsepucky. What would Adam Smith say about a corporation suing for "expected" profits? There must be an earthquake in the vicinity of his resting place.
A corporation is not a human being. It has a charter from the state, not a birth certificate. It has what rights we give them. It is not entitled to human rights.
If a corporation wants a profit, it has every right to manufacture a safe product and put it on the market at a reasonable price in competition with other similar manufactured goods made in the market or even some that are as radically different as a solar panel is to a barrel of oil that accomplish the same thing.
By a safe product, I mean one that that doesn't harm the end user if used as directed, either as an individual or as a member of society or the biosphere. Yes, that means the state has the right to ban the use of tobacco products or even petroleum products, and that the poisoners at Philip Morris or the polluters at ExxonMobil should not be able to have a a private system of justice at its disposal in order to seek a more favorable judgment than one it might get in a real court.
I also don't think it proper for politicians who are guilty of taking bribes generous campaign contributions from corporate officers and high ranking corporate employees, even acting in the fictitious name of the corporation itself, to pass judgment on a radical document that upsets the world's political and legal order by granting artificial persons the right to realize expected profits, something that no reasonable person would expect to find in a state of nature. The majority of our congressmen, who punitively represent us, are bought and paid for by the very legal entities who stand to benefit from a document which they negotiated among themselves. If that sounds corrupt, there's a good reason for it.
Yes, I am calling for mass civil disobedience in response to the passage of the TPP and its sinister sister trade deals, TTIP and TISA. I think that would be the just and proper response. Moreover, I call for civil disobedience worldwide and maintain that very few will benefit from these deals and most of us will just be fucked over.
Having said that, there is a little matter I need some help me with. I have read parts of the TPP and perused over others, so I may have missed something that you seem to think is there. So persuade me that I'm all wet. Here's your assignment:
Please tell us how Dred Scott could have brought his complaint before an ISDS panel. Could he have gotten a better judgment there than he got from the Supreme Court in 1857. If Mr. Scott could not have appealed to the ISDS, what provision in the TPP could Mr. Scott have used to argue that he should be set free, how a result in his favor might have been arrived at and how this decision would be enforced under the TPP.
Thank you in advance.
!!
Up to now I haven't said that I won't vote for Mrs. Clinton; nor have I said that I will. I'll keep my final decision to myself.
Who wins this elections is less important than what we do afterwards. America has become an oligarchy, and oligarchies never end well for either the oligarchs or those they oppress. We will have to take matters into our own hands to wrest power from the oligarchs and restore democratic government. Who is elected will make no difference in that respect.
The word aristocracy means government by the best. Isn't that a hoot? Slave owners and serf drivers were never the best humanity had to offer and, by definition, were unfit to rule other men. I expect no more of industrialists and financiers who have rigged the system in there favor. We've seen what they have to offer us: a capitalist system without a middle class; a polluted world that never gets cleaned up. Nothing can make that a vision of a sustainable society. If the oligarchs who run a corporation want to do the right thing, they are helpless. To do so would put their corporation at a competitive disadvantage. That is the one thing they cannot do, that they can never do.
What is the one thing we cannot do? We cannot allow them to destroy life on this planet. We know that the many oligarchs have known for decades that climate change is not a hoax. For them to continue to drill for oil and mine for coal without taking into consideration what they doing to not just to our way of life but to life itself is an unimaginable, unspeakable crime against humanity.
It doesn't matter if the name for this system is neoliberalism, supply-side economics, trickle-down or Reaganomics. It must be put out of its misery before it fosters more misery to working people of the world, to all that live on the earth, drink its water and breath its air.
You and I, not the candidates of our choice, are the man on the white horse.
Power to the people.
To those who call Hillary a progressive
[center]
[/center][font size="1"]from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.
[/font]
I started describing myself as a progressive toward the end of the Bill Clinton administration when it was clear that he favored trickle-down economics and supported trade agreements that hurt most Americans, in addition to signing Republican laws like welfare deform, and the deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industry. It seemed to me that it was a wholesale embrace of Reaganomics, yet Clinton and his minions continued to call themselves liberals. OK, if liberals were such wimps, then I must be something else.
When, after acquiescing to Generalissimo Bush's and Vice Premier Cheney's coup d'etat of 2000, congressmen and senators who once described themselves as liberals, including Senator Hillary Clinton, began supporting his imperialist designs on Iraq, my view that liberals were wimps was reinforced. The Frat Boy's program for war included an assault on the due process of law and other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms as well as the explicit use of torture, the liberals went right along and voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, every special appropriation to fund the war the Bush Junta requested and, in 2006, more restrictions on civil liberties. Liberals, who I had long thought of as wimps, hardly seemed to be liberals any more; and I continued to call myself a progressive.
When Barack Obama ran for President, I thought this was a kindred spirit I could get behind. He opposed the war in Iraq and favored diplomacy over just sending in the Marines any time some dictator, or even an elected leader, became troublesome; he favored a more transparent government that would return to a guarantee of civil liberties for its common citizens, perhaps even protecting the powerless from the powerful. In the wake of the crash of 2008, he criticized the role of bankers and banking deregulation. And health insurance reform of some kind? I was in.
It would be wrong to say that he didn't mean a word of it. He did get us out of Iraq and now seems to be in the process of getting us back in to Iraq (and Syria and Jordan and Lebanon) without a clear plan of what to do there. He did prod congress into passing a watered down health insurance reform package that was less than a full-blown European style socialized medical program and still left unscrupulous health insurance companies in place to continue to prove why we really need full-blown European style socialized medicine. He has a personal dislike of war as a policy and would rather negotiate an agreement with a hostile state rather than go to war with it has paid dividends, such as the agreement with Iran. Beyond that, there's little good to say about the last six and a half years. That's not all President Obama's fault. The racist and misogynist Republican party has marched lock step against anything he proposes, except bad trade deals. They saw a successful black man and responded as racists have since emancipation: they tried to kill his mule and pour manure down his well. However, no Republican held a gun to President Obama's or Attorney General Eric Holder's head to get them to treat Wall Street criminals with kid gloves. Obama needed no encouragement from Republicans to negotiate the TPP, TTIP or TISA. No progressive would have entered such negotiations. The unprecedented secrecy in negotiating the the deals and the ridiculous procedures that members of Congress were made to go through just to read the damned thing indicates that there's something willfully opaque about the process and that there's something political/financial establishment doesn't want the common people to know. A progressive, of course, believes in transparency.
It used to be that Americans simply did not do as well under Republican administrations as under Democratic administrations. Nowadays. wages fall under Republicans and remain stagnant under Democrats. That may make Democrats better than Republicans, but it's nothing to write home about.
A progressive would not have negotiated free trade agreements; a progressive would not have been so nice to Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd; a progressive would fight to undo banking deregulation; a progressive would not but boots on the ground in the Middle East or anywhere else with a clear idea of what military force is supposed to accomplish. Mrs. Clinton's present opposition to the TPP is unconvincing. She give no specific reason for opposing it. Mrs. Clinton takes a lot of money from Wall Street and cannot be expected to roll back banking deregulation. Reinstating Glass-Steagal is a progressive position; Alan Blinder, an aid to Mrs. Clinton, said that is something she would not do and Mrs. Clinton has said nothing to set the record straight. Mrs. Clinton, in word and deed, has supported a disastrous and unnecessary war in what can only be described as an anti-progressive political decision.
While Mrs. Clinton has a laudable record on civil rights for women, racial minorities and, perhaps belatedly, the LGBT community, her spotty record on issues of economic justice makes these bright spots on her career ring hollow. Social justice for traditionally persecuted minorities works hand-in-hand with economic justice for American workers. To support one and not the other leaves at best a watered down version of both. The two cannot be separated. So even here, Mrs. Clinton is not a progressive.
Please don't call Mrs. Clinton a progressive. It cheapens the word. It is an abuse of the English language.
Don't call Hillary Clinton a progressive.
I'm signing no loyalty oaths, even one proffered in jest
I will not vote Republican, I can assure you of that.
I will vote only very reluctantly for a corporatist. Hillary Clinton, like DLC/Third Way/New Democrats in general, is a corporatist. So is Barack Obama. So is Bill Clinton. This is a program that follows an economic theory called variously neoliberalism, Reaganomics, supply side economics or trickle-down economics. It is a fundamentally an unsustainable system and the results have been the transfer of wealth upwards. You may ask why almost all the income created since the crash of 2008 goes to a small class of people who own at least as much wealth than the bottom 50%. Yes, the fact that every president or either party we've had since 1980 has been a corporatist has a lot to do with it. The Free Trade pacts they have pushed have a lot to do with it. The fact that the middle class has evaporated during this time has a lot to do with it.
Capitalism is impossible to maintain without a market full of buyers. Without a large and thriving middle class, that will not be the case. My parents, who would both be over 100 today, saw that movie when they were young. It was called the Great Depression. They told me that I wouldn't want to see it. They told me what it was like.
I understand your point, Ms Vee. In spite of being a corporatist, Mrs Clinton has laudable views on equality before the law. She would be better than Jeb Bush, who, pathetic as it sounds, is the best the Republicans have to offer. There is a great deal of injustice afoot these days. Some of it is social injustice and some of it is economic injustice. Some of it seems more aimed at you, some of might be more aimed at me and quite a bit of it is aimed at both of us at once.
I'll close by saying that although we may agree on much, I still resent your post suggesting that possess some luxury or privilege that I can think about not voting for for a corporatist Democrat over a corporatist Republican. I have no luxuries. I'm a sick old man living on disability in ratty mobile home. I will turn 65 a few days before the 2016 election. I go into a panic whenever Paul Ryan, apparently soon to be Speaker of the House, tells me the country can't afford social security and medicare and that I am in a national hammock or when President Obama speaks warmly of the recommendations of the bipartisan catfood commission he appointed during his first term.
Even if Bernie is elected president, then I will still be hitting the streets in protest of what this country has become under the regime of neoliberalism or Reaganomics or whatever you want to call it. It will feel better, though, if the President is somebody who tells me that is exactly what good citizens should do in these times, rather than some mealy-mouthed pean about the virtues of law and order. And if the police shoot, I'll stand in front and make a pathetic effort to shield all I can. That, I think, would beat starving to death so that the rich can have more and more.
Even if this is a loyalty oath, I will not sign it; whether it is or isn't, I will not make promises
I've been watching Mrs Clinton for about a quarter-century now. She's been on my bad side more often than she has been on my good side. I'm tired of getting screwed, and the best thing I can say about the prospect of another New Democrat as president is that New Democrats don't screw us quite as bad as Republicans do.
I'll be 65 in a little more than a year. I'm a veteran. I made some mistakes and got some bad breaks. I'll probably die in poverty. I can deal with that, but I can't deal with the prospect of starving to death in a nation where no one should go hungry so that crooked banks can continue to rob the public and fossil fuel corporations can stay on life support while they poison the air and water and make the planet less habitable and then lie about it. I have major depression, which is probably showing through as I write this, but I didn't forget to take my last night. I don't think you have to suffer from mental illness to be upset about things as they are.
Democrats, that is New Democrats, are as responsible as Republicans for this state of affairs. Ronald Reagan's tenure in the White House was a disaster for America. Banking became the primary "industry" in America and deregulation and privatization took place under the dubious theory that successful businessmen are more rational than the rest of us and that a market regulates itself by nature. The result was mourning in America. We should know by mow that this is nonsense. Those who say they still believe it are either fools or political stooges looking for generous campaign contributions, better known as bribes, from corporate criminals like Legs Dimon and Pretty Boy Lloyd. Perhaps an even greater disaster was when some Democrats, blinded by the glitter and strobe lights of the propaganda from archconservatives about how good things were under Reagan, adopted Reaganomics as their own; they mayu call it something else, but it's still tricle down economics and it's still a failure. We ended up with Wall Street toads like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers pushing Republican policies in Democratic administrations. We got the deregulation of the communications industries, welfare deform and NAFTA. Those are not accomplishments in which any Democrat should take any pride.
We have an America that no New Dealer would recognize as spawning from the America they bequeathed to us. We fight imperialist wars to secure oil for western oil companies, a product we can replace and the sooner the better, widening income inequality and fascist leaders, some even passing a Democrats, who think the Fourth Amendment is dysfunctional and should be ignored. This is an America, and even a world, where bankers fixing interest rates manifests the blessings of liberty and workers organizing a union is subversive, even thuggish, activity.
I am supporting a candidate who very clearly wants to put a stop to this madness and reverse it. I am opposing a candidate who has been at the foundations of changing the Democratic party from a party of the people into Wall Street's go-to guys in government. Her recent populist pronouncements, at odds with her corporate-friendly past, are as murky and unconvincing as the pronouncement by oligarch-controlled media that she "crushed" all of her opponents Tuesday night.
Hillary Clinton is a hard pill for me to swallow. I will not make any promises I can't keep, so at this time I will not promise to vote for her in the general election if she is the nominee of the Democratic Party. I'll probably need every minute of the time between the close of the Philadelphia convention in August 2016 to when I vote on November 8 to make my final decision.
I will promise this: whoever is elected President, even if it is Bernie Sanders himself, then I will be in the streets demanding that the policies and programs he advocates today are enacted.
K/R
<rant>
Well, we always said that the revolution will not be televised. The networks, broadcast and cable, are part of the oligarchy. They are part of the decadent aristocracy that needs to be removed from power, the sooner the better.
If you are getting your news from the MSM (by which I have never included FoxNews), then you are as misinformed as you would be watching FoxNews.
Kill your television set. Block ads on the internet. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not not going to take the oligarchs' fucking bullshit any more.
Who stands for the primacy of humanity over artificial persons? Who believes that life on a sustainable planet is more important than corporate profits? Stand up for the common people over the pretentious elites. We can run the world better than they can.
If this is socialism, let us make the most of it.
</rant>
Let's stop this charade, shall we? We know quite a bit about what's in it
thanks to Mr. Assange and his organization. At least somedy is working to a the public informed in what is putatively a democratic state.
In addition, the fact that we "don't know" what's in it is reason enough to oppose it. We have every right to know what's in it, yet this agreement was negotiated by representatives of large corporations, major polluters and crooked banks.
Do we have any obligation to abide by an agreement not in our interest made in secret by enemies of the People and passed, as it will be, virtually without debate by corrupt politicians bought and paid for by the very polluters, banksters and union busters who stand to benefit at the expense of the public? I say we do not, and no court or militarized police force can make it so.
OK, Evil DUers: What do we do about Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals?
I've calmed down enough that want to get serious about this? Let's put our thinking caps on.
The goal is to sink Turing and lighten Shkreli's pocketbook.
Can we get a Boycott and Divestment movement going? Are there other assets this bastard holds that can be targeted?
Ideas are welcome. If your going to suggest anything less than legal, at least have the courtesy to suggest something that would be consistent with the spirit of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Well, my fellow Sandernistas, it's been a pretty good week, has it not?
We've got the positive feedback from the Liberty U appearance, another million dollars raised and Bernie continuing to rise in the polls.
Furthermore, we should consider it a positive sign that the establishment has stopped ignoring Bernie and have moved on to attacking him. It sounds like they're trying to smear him as a socialist. Now, against any other Democrat, that would just be ridiculous. Remember, the Republicans are the same people who are still trying to convince us that President Obama is a socialist. In Bernie's case, calling him a socialist is no more a smear than would be calling him a Jew. If any wants to know if Bernie is a socialist, he doesn't need Republicans or Third Way Democrats to tell him. One need only ask Bernie and he will tell you that he is a socialist.
By 2015, thirty-five years after the introduction of Reaganomics (called the Third Way or neoliberalism by it adherents in the Democratic Party), Bernie's socialism looks like a good thing. It's not Mao or Stalin, although the establishment will try hard to make it look that way; it's the socialism of Clement Atlee or Olof Palme. It's certainly better to think about a future where criminal bankers go to jail, industrial polluters are told to clean up their mess and we can call a spade a spade and refer to large corporate campaign contributions as bribes than to face another thirty-five years of the status quo in which factory are shut down and college graduates have more debt than job prospects.
Overturn Citizens United, stop "free" trade, end endless wars and preserve justice and democracy. Vote for Bernie!
Shout it from the Rooftops
What needs to be shouted from the rooftops today is that austerity always fails, always has failed and always will fail. There is no way to bring a nation to prosperity by depriving the mass of its populace of income. It doesn't work and cannot work.
There may be those who actually believe that this is the right course to pursue, but most are no doubt the rich and powerful who demand that such a course be taken because to do so will make them richer and more powerful at the expense of masses. Either way it is a crime to impose austerity on a population. Those who pursue this vile course of action for purely selfish ends are the kind of people for whom the French invented the guillotine. Those who believe in austerity out of willful ignorance should be held responsible for their own willful ignorance.
Advocating austerity is no more acceptable than denying climate science. Imposing austerity on a population should be an international crime against humanity, punishable by imprisoning the politicians who spearheaded austerity measures into law, the administrators who implemented those laws and the private businessmen who influenced governments to take such measures knowing that they would profit from the misery of the masses. Just as genocide or wars of aggression or imperial designs are outlawed internationally, just as torture is outlawed, so should austerity measures be condemned in the hopes that it soon shall be swept into the dust bin of history.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Sacramento Valley, California
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 45,984
