Mark Karlin — The Trans-Pacific Partnership Legalizes Corporate Rights Prevailing Over Human Rights

The basic premise of free trade is to allow global companies to move freely between borders to exploit low wage labor, be free from any but the most minimal environmental standards, not be subject to lawsuits in many areas, and move corporate bank accounts around the world to achieve the lowest taxation possible.

It's ironic that at the same time the TPP is being negotiated in the utmost secrecy, the US is discussing how to further increase an already militarized border with Mexico to stop the free movement of people. So, free trade agreements guarantee the rights of corporations to hop around the world to exploit workers and the environment (among other provisions), but people within those nations are restricted in their movements.

In these sense, when it comes to global trade treaties, corporations have more rights than people.

Corporate rights prevail over human rights. That's the essence of so-called "free trade agreements" -- and the TPP is allegedly a free trade agreement on steroids.

BuzzFlash

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Legalizes Corporate Rights Prevailing Over Human Rights

Mark Karlin, Editor Of Buzzflash At Truthout
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Neoliberalism (economic liberalism as a political philosophy) holds that free markets, free trade, and free capital flows are the hallmark of democratic states and the non qua non of global prosperity. Without free movement of people (labor), this is a joke. It is recipe for corporate fascism, political repression, economic equality, and social privilege.

Jake Bernstein — New York Fed fired examiner who refused to go soft on Goldman Sachs: report

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.

Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

The Raw Story
New York Fed fired examiner who refused to go soft on Goldman Sachs: report
Jake Bernstein, ProPublica

Sound like fascism to you? Oh, right, under fascism she would have been disappeared instead of just fired for doing her job in a way that proved inconvenient for TPTB.

Linda Beale — The Evils of Corporatism

What we have today is not capitalism but corporatism, the alliance of Big Business and Big Finance with government through cronyism and corruption in form of legalized bribery and the revolving door. Worse, it is the foundation of empire, and thus closely approximates Mussolini's definition of fascism as corporate statism, but behind the facade of democracy.

Angry Bear
The Evils of Corporatism
Linda Beale

Chris Hedges calls "fascism"

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a written statement about the released files: “This production [of information], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protesters organizing with the Occupy movement. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

The FBI documents are not only a chilling example of how widespread this surveillance and obstruction has become, they are an explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent. Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect. These documents are part of the plan to make us fearful, compliant and disempowered. They mark, I suspect, a government attempt to end peaceful mass protests by responding with repression to the grievances of Americans. When the corporate-financed group FreedomWorks bused in goons to disrupt Democratic candidates’ town hall meetings about the federal health care legislation in August 2009, Eric Zuesse of the Business Insider notes, “there was no FBI surveillance of those corporate-organized disruptions of legitimate democratic processes. There also were no subsequent FreedomWorks applications for Freedom of Information Act releases of FBI files regarding such surveillance being used against them—because there was no such FBI campaign against them.”

The combination of intimidation tactics by right-wing fringe groups, which speak in the language of violence and hate, with the state’s massive intrusion into the personal affairs of the citizen is corporate fascism. And we are much farther down that road than many of us care to admit. [emphasis added]

Truthdig
Chris Hedges: New Documents on Activist Surveillance May Be "Just the Tip of the Iceberg"
Chris Hedges | News Analysi
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)