TTIP: Capitalism trumps Democracy

The point was made in the original treatise for people-centered economics

14. Manipulation of numbers, represented by currency/money, allows writing “new” money as needed.  There is no tangible asset, or anchor.  There are only numbers, managed by whomever might maneuver into position to do so.  Economics came to be based on numbers, rather than real human beings.

15. On that basis, capitalism trumped people and therefore trumped democracy.  Democracy is about people, who since Descartes are considered necessarily real, rather than numbers which are not necessarily real.  An imaginary construct, numbers, rule a real construct, people.  That arrangement allows for disposal of real human beings, in the name of the imaginary construct.

More than a decade later  founder Terry Hallman delivered his first presentation to the internal Economics for Ecology conference saying: 

"Overall, capitalism was able to produce a much larger middle class of people between rich and poor, and has gained precedence due to making safe and secure life possible for more people.   But, it's various methods over the past 100 years left millions of people to suffer and die more indirectly than outright murder.  Those people were dismissed as relatively unimportant, mostly left to die from deprivation rather than outright execution.  In all systems, some rationale was created to either dismiss people and leave them to die, or, kill people outright.  In the end, for the victims, the result was identical.

In that context of disposing of people, by all economic systems, and with capitalism having become predominant, financial profit came to rule the day.  Profit, the bottom line, was master of all else.  People and the environment we live in were secondary considerations.  The vehicle of Western capitalism was, and is, corporations.

Corporations are legal structures created as legal entities to carry out the business – financial – objectives.  Under US law, corporations are a legal person.  What sort of person?  According the psychological assessment measures in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) used for personality assessment, corporations meet the strict clinical definition of a psychopath.  “Psychopath” is another word for lunatic, or, someone who is legally, criminally insane."

if indeed, a corporation can be defended in law as an an insane person it would absolve it from punishment for any injury or injustice done to society.

Yet with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. corporations will have the ability to sue governments whose laws may inhibit their potential to maximise profit regardless of the harm done to people and.the environment.    

From the 1970s the principle of shareholder value, has guided the corporate perception of social responsibility, As Milton Friedman reasoned:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

What P-CED argued on the other hand, is that it's the shareholders who determine the extent to which corporations serve their communities.   

"If a corporation wants to donate to its local community, it can do so, be it one percent, five percent, fifty or even seventy percent. There is no one to protest or dictate otherwise, except a board of directors and stockholders. This is not a small consideration, since most boards and stockholders would object.  But, if an a priori arrangement has been made with said stockholders and directors such that this direction of profits is entirely the point, then no objection can emerge. Indeed, the corporate charter can require that these monies be directed into community development funds, such as a permanent, irrevocable trust fund."

In 2012, with her book The Shareholder Value Myth law professor Lynn Stout validated the P-CED argument.  

In practice as a business operating for the benefit of society, P-CED would go on to challenge profit maximisation in childcare, the cash cow of orphan institutions in Ukraine, We would  discover a trade in aborted foetuses and access being given to those wishing to "play" with children. A culture of silence prevailed, through fear.

Professor Michael Sandel asks us to consider the ethical limits of markets. How long before the voice of ethical reason is silenced by corporate interests? Before the insane outlaw sanity?