The Destruction Of National Sovreignty In Favor Of Corporations

Remember the Battle For Seattle?

Flush with the success of NAFTA and CAFTA, which turned the riches of North and Central America over to rapacious corporations bent on digging out every last bit of wealth without worrying about sovereign nations stopping them with pesky laws and regulations, the US went for broke. The entire world was to be subject to the WTO.

In Seattle, the Teamsters and the Turtles combined to fight the meeting of the world's elite bent on destroying labor and the environment in their quest for more loot. And they won! Temporarily.

Undaunted, the rich and powerful met again in Cancun, where a South Korean farmer immolated himself in protest, and thwarted their evil plans once again.

But when Obama came in the 1% of the world had a worthy and determined campaigner. What Obama did was put speech controls on the negotiators, forbidding them from speaking and threatening them with severe consequences for telling the public just what was in the TPP they were negotiating.

And Obama, the Drone King, could make his threats scarily real.

We organized anyway, and we held it off long enough for Trump to be elected. On his first day in office, he tore up the TPP.

Yay!

But apparently the world's elite decided to switch their plans for power to the WHO instead of the WTO. At least, as near as I can tell.

But now the US has left the WHO also! Yay!.

That's a long way to talk about what is happening now.

The worst part of the WTO and TPP were the Investor-State Dispute Settlement agreements, where sovereign governments who responded to the concerns of their populations by putting limits on corporate ravages, could be sued by the corporations. And no national or international courts could be involved, just an arbitration panel appointed to make a judgement.

Laws? We don't need no stinking laws!

There are many outrageous cases where corporations sued for loss of potential profits due to laws protecting citizens or the environment, and won in the secret arbitration courts, forcing countries to pay millions to said corporations.

But now Russia is going to use the system to sue Euroclear for stealing their sovereign funds.

I am delighted. Hoist those greedy assholes on their own petard, I say.

As Yves Smith puts it:

"In any event, pass the popcorn. Things are about to get ugly. The long-standing erosion of national rights in favor of stateless investors is being turned against its neoliberal creators."