How the World Works - the Basis if Law

It his hard to find a more accurate and concise summary of the meaning of "law" as we experience it in the real world:

"Liberal democracy rests on three distinct sets of rights: property rights, political rights, and civil rights. The first set of rights protects owners and investors from expropriation. The second ensures that groups that win electoral contests can assume power and choose policies to their liking - provided these policies do not violate the other two sets of rights. Finally, civil rights guarantee equal treatment before the law and equal access to public services such as education. Property rights and political rights both have powerful beneficiaries. Property rights are of interest primarily to the elite - owners and investors. They may be comparatively few in number, but they can mobilize material resources if they do not get their way. They can take their money elsewhere, or choose not to invest - imposing substantial costs on the rest of society.

 Political rights are of interest primarily to the organized masses - the working class or ethnic majority, depending on the structure and cleavages in society. Members of the majority may be comparatively poor, but they have numbers on their side. They can threaten the elite with uprisings and expropriation. The main beneficiaries of civil rights, by contrast, are typically minorities that possess neither wealth nor numbers. Turkey's Kurds, Hungary's Roma, Russia's liberals, or Mexico's indigenous population ordinarily command little power within their countries. Their demands for equal rights therefore do not have the potency that demands for property and political rights have."

Dani Rodrik, Sharun Madand 

In 2015, "Property Rights" pertain to more than just ordinary stuff. Most notably, they pertain to capital, investments and the "rights" of international corporations to their profits and protection by law. Neoliberal "free trade" agreements such as the "secret" Trans-Pacific Partnership Agrement (TPP - see here for secret text) spell out such "rights" in detail - trumping the laws of the nations and effectively pulling down national borders. 

There are no such "rights" assigned to ordinary people, such as, for example, the right to cross borders and be treated the way a citizen in the destination country would be treated (which is precisely the right granted to, say, Shell, BP or CITIBANK).

Obviously, if Nations are dissolved by these agreements, political rights become meaningless. For example, recent promises of the NDP in Alberta to re-negotiate royalty agreements with foreign oil companies are empty, as are any policy that would favor local businesses, consumers or employees over the policies of foreign companies.

TPP sets up a situation where individuals, not even the governments they elect, have equal standing before the world government set up by TPP and the like.

If this weren't bad enough, the "World Government" set up in this way is what I call in this blog a "dragon" - something with a life of its own, fighting progressively to thrive and grow but beyond anything we might recognize as morality. 

Millions are swept up (assimilated)  to defend the dragon but they are interchangeable "cogs in the machine" -- their individual human personality  or personal misgivings are completely irrelevant to the welfare and growth of the dragon. Assimilation is based on self interest, power, money, corruption - especially corruption of decision making processes and "democracy.

In contrast, those defending political and civil rights are human and specifically come together to defend the rights of human beings to thrive (or even live).

The result is a "perfect storm" where immensely powerful forces conspire in an explicit attacks human welfare. Human reason is corrupted by a convergence of religious thinking ("faith based", "authority based" thinking, not evidence or toleration). The forces of "property" have the technical ability to integrate under one system and they are very reluctant to tolerate systems that are *not* integrated. The military power of the great nations is at service of large international corporations like Exxon and [china]. Nations sell-off of vast public property to private interests.