Bolivia was the first nation to begin leaving a legal system that allows foreign companies to sue governments behind closed doors. Now, other countries are following.
For the western hemisphere that includes things like:
FTAA
NAFTA
Which allows corps and foreign govs to SUPERCEDE local national laws and rights.
Adding …
Canada/China Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement (FIPPA) - signed by Conservative PM Stephen Harper in 2012 (effective in 2014), locking Canada into it for 31 years.
Gants. Arguing that exiting agreements could hurt climate investment. Color me shocked.
Good. This is long overdue.
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing this.
It’s an interesting example how something that most people wouldn’t want if they knew about it still gets implemented.
One reason I want worker cooperatives to become the dominant type of business is that it would reduce the number of powerful actors which are unaccountable to the public. Democratic entities still make bad decisions, but fewer, and there’s a mechanism for error correction.
Do you think maybe capitalism was a bad idea?
Unregulated capitalism.
We’re human, after all. We have to check ourselves in spite of our desire to not be checked.
Capitalism is a solid system and far better than feudalism… but it needs strong guardrails and is just a stepping stone on the path to superior systems.
It was a good and necessary idea - but we can move beyond it now.
IMHO Capitalism as it is practiced today is problematic because we removed actions from their consequences and made bottom line the king. This problem of course is exacerbated by never before experienced levels of global interconnectivity.
capitalism is great for things that everyone does not need. so in other words things that they can choose to have or not to have. In addition there needs to be real and significant competition which is inefficient when you talk infrastructure (so for utilities you would need multiple electric systems and multiple gas hookups and such). Lastly you need to regulate them from doing anything untoward and taxes have to be collected to not allow massive wealth disparities. There may be some future superior system but I sorta doubt it. I could see it getting to the point of not being much of a thing for the average person (a la star trek were at an individual level because of replicators it does not mean much but like between planets and species and just on the frontier you still have it.)
Investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, lets foreign companies bypass national courts and sue governments before international panels of arbitrators.
Is this about the MAI?
Edit: for those unaware about the MAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateral_Agreement_on_Investment
Man this is going to go up there with citiens united and the patriot act for me. Its pretty clear this allowed for the hyper globalism we have had since.
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was a draft agreement negotiated in secret between members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) between 1995 and 1998.[1][2] It sought to establish a new body of universal investment laws that would grant corporations unconditional rights to engage in financial operations around the world, without any regard to national laws and citizens’ rights. The draft gave corporations a right to sue governments if national health, labor or environment legislation threatened their interests.
Literally designed to put the interests of corporations above the interests of nations and their citizens
