A German documentary on theinvestor rights in trade agreements - ISDS - now with English subtitles : "Corporations Complain - We Pay".
Canada and Canadian ISDS losses - described as the "gold rush in the ISDS industry" - figure prominently in the film :
"Canada is the only western country that has ever accepted ISDS with the United States. We're actually one of the most sued countries, always by US companies, because we signed one treaty that allowed ISDS with the United States.
And ultimately it only exists because at some point everyone expects the public will have to pay."
In 1989 not a single lawsuit was filed; by the end of 2014 there were over 600:
"It's a new way to access public money."
The film traces the story of the two Nova Scotia lobster fishermen who fought for five years and successfully turned back US corp Bilcon's bid to build a basalt quarry on environmental grounds, only to have the ISDS tribune rule against them. Bilcon sued for US $300M over future financial loss on a quarry they hadn't even started building. As lobsterman Kemp Stanton remarks :
"If you can make US$300 million and not have to build the quarry, it'd be stupid to build it."
And because ISDS litigation costs US$4-8 million, New York lawyer Selvyn Siedel brokers deals between "those who want to sue and those who want to invest in such litigation - litigation funders". A whole new industry model with returns of $20M of taxpayer money on an initial $5M investment. US litigation financiers have seen their own profits rise 900% by fuelling more corporations to launch more cases against sovereign governments over domestic policies :
"The litigation funders are the ones greasing the wheels of this system"
as they did against the easy pickings of Spain and Greece during their financial insolvencies, using shell companies in Luxembourg, phantom mailbox companies with no employees, to sue their own governments for lost profits. In Germany, the government of Hamburg gave in to a German corp suing them for $1B through a New York company rather than face the loaded odds of an ISDS tribunal. Liberal Marc Lalonde was president of that ISDS tribunal, working alongside US Republican Larry Craig. Sylvan Seidel in New York sees a new business opportunity in these lawsuits - bundle them as investment stocks :
"Banks, hedge funds and insurance companies are investing in this growing market. It's like a casino and the party for litigation funders is not over yet. As this grows, more corporations launch cases against governments."
CETA, TPP, TTIP - they're all trojan horse casinos designed to enable the arbitration industry to change laws in sovereign states while bleeding the public purse. Good doc. h/t Murray Dobbin who circulated the link to it last night. The Osgood Hall law prof featured in the doc wrote a Tyee column last month on the TPP : Gus Van Harten : Seven Ways TPP Favours Mega-rich Foreign Investors, Not Canadians .
The best part of International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland signing the U.S. corporate rights agreement TPP - the Trans-Pacific Partnership - in Aukland NZ yesterday was that it was done here in this gambling casino, and a casino is where the house always wins. In her 2012 book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Freeland explains :
"Trying to slant the rules of the game in your favour isn't an aberration, it is what all businesses seek to do. The difference isn't between having virtuous and villainous business people, it is about whether your society has the right rules and policing able to enforce them."
Of course this 'enforcement' would first entail our government not ditching those 'right rules' or 'policing' just because transnational corporations and their revolving-door crony capitalists within government find them inconvenient. Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, October 5 2015 :
“The Trans-Pacific Partnership stands to remove trade barriers, widely expand free trade for Canada, and increase opportunities for our middle class and those working hard to join it.... The government has an obligation to be open and honest about the negotiation process ..."
“The negotiations are finished and for Canadians it’s important to understand that it’s a decision of yes or no..."
All countries have two years to ratify it, but the treaty comes into force if the United States, Japan and four other countries give their approval.
“It’s important for us to understand that we don’t have a veto.”
Yesterday she said : "There is a big difference between signing and ratifying", promising negotiations and parliamentary committees and round tables etc, all of which are very nice but none of which are legally binding on the Liberal caucus. Now that we've signed off on it however, we are all supposed to pin our hopes on those. Flashback to the Liberal Convention of 2014 two years ago... Guest speaker and TPP advocate, former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers is interviewed on stage by Freeland, who introduces him as "a dear friend, teacher, and probably the smartest person I know". Summers, she explains, is there to give the Libs "some great ideas about how to transform Canada and in so doing transform the world."
Now most of us probably remember Larry Summers as the US bank deregulator - a prominent architect alongside Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin in reversing the 1933 US Glass-Steagall Act, that Depression-era legislation which prevented US banks from turning into the high-risk hedge-fund casinos making wild bets against their own depositors' money they became in the late 2000's. Or we remember him as the $5M hedge fund advisor who made millions in speaking fees from the hedge funds he later helped regulate while advocating tax cuts and no ceiling on CEO pay for stimulus recipients. Or as a Bilderberg Group Steering Committee member.
Whatev.
What I wish is that rather than continue to parrot all that "all middle-class liberals together" shmooze that Summers was selling the Libs two years ago, including airily blowing off the casino bank crisis he helped precipitate, better the Liberals should instead try out what Summers, still a strident TPP advocate, is saying now :
"First, the era of agreements that achieve freer trade in the classic sense is essentially over. The world’s remaining tariff and quota barriers are small and, where present, less reflections of the triumph of protectionist interests and more a result of deep cultural values.
What we call trade agreements are in fact agreements on the protection of investments and the achievement of regulatory harmonization...
Concerns that trade agreements may be a means to circumvent traditional procedures for taking up issues ranging from immigration to financial regulation must be taken seriously.
Being pressed down everywhere are middle classes who lack the wherewithal to take advantage of new global markets and do not want to compete with low-cost foreign labor. Our challenge now is less to increase globalization than to make the globalization we have work for our citizens."
Try to keep up with your own hero's rhetoric here, Libs.
