US Says 'No' To EU Plan For New Corporate Sovereignty Courts: So What Happens Now With TAFTA/TTIP?
from the what's-plan-b,-again? dept
Back in May, we wrote about the European Commission's attempt to put lipstick on the corporate sovereignty pig. Its attempt to "reform" the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system was largely driven by the massive rejection of the whole approach by respondents to the Commission's consultation on the subject last year. Of the 150,000 people who took the trouble to respond, 145,000 said they did not want corporate sovereignty provisions of any kind. Even the European Commission could not spin that as a mandate for business as usual, and so it came up with what it called a "path for reform" (pdf). By promising to solve the all-too evident "problems" of corporate sovereignty by coming up with something it claimed was better, its evident plan was to include this re-branded ISDS as part of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations with the US.
The "path for reform" starts from some tinkering with a few elements of the basic ISDS approach that leaves the basic idea untouched, and moves towards something slightly more radical -- a permanent court for settling investor-state disputes:
The EU should pursue the creation of one permanent court. This court would apply to multiple agreements and between different trading partners, also on the basis of an opt-in system. The objective would be to multilateralise the court either as a self-standing international body or by embedding it into an existing multilateral organization. Work has already begun on how to start this process, in particular on aspects such as architecture, organisation, costs and participation of other partners.
The European Commission probably thought this was a pretty clever move: head off objections to ISDS and its ad-hoc tribunals by recasting it as a permanent court of a more traditional kind. There's just one slight problem with this idea: according to the respected German newspaper Die Welt, the US rejects it completely (original in German):
There's no question of such a [judicial] authority. The US will not tolerate interference in its national sovereignty.
That's a rather ironic viewpoint, given that ISDS already interferes with national sovereignty. Assuming that Die Welt's source is trustworthy, the US attitude may well arise from the fact that it has never lost an ISDS case, and perhaps believes, somewhat naively, that it never will. That seems unlikely: if TAFTA/TTIP includes corporate sovereignty, more than 3,400 parent corporations in EU nations, owning more than 24,200 subsidiaries in the US, will suddenly gain the right to sue the US government using the mechanism, in connection with any of their past, present or future investments there.
Whatever its reasoning, a refusal by the US to countenance the creation of a new permanent court dealing with investment disputes leaves the European Commission's TTIP strategy on this point in tatters. It will be interesting to see whether it now begins to row back from the idea of creating a completely new court, and starts extolling the virtues of a slightly "reformed" ISDS instead.
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Filed Under: corporate sovereignty, eu, international court, isds, national sovereignty, tafta, ttip, us
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That's easy enough to answer
They've been paid, or 'paid', to get corporate sovereignty in place everywhere it can be, a trifle like 'the overwhelming majority of the public is against it' isn't going to even slow them down, barring some ACTA protests-level opposition.
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Re: That's easy enough to answer
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Re: Re: That's easy enough to answer
To make matters worse the elections to theEuropean parliament are generally not synchronised with any national elections and hence a disproportionate number of "protest party" candidates are usually elected.
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Re: Re: Re: That's easy enough to answer
That is shockingly easy enough.
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On top of that it is doubfull if ISDS as it stands will be accepted by Germany and possibly France.
On top of that it needs to be approved by the European Parliament, which at this point looks a bit iffy.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: That's easy enough to answer
Here in Canada, we're holding national elections in Oct. All three lead parties (out of ca. four possibles) support TPP.
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Re: That's easy enough to answer
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This made me vomit a bit.
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Yeah it would be funny if the US had any sovereignty left. Now its all about corporations and Israel.
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Does that mean that they are going to shut down their sham elections, too? After all, it makes the hoi polloi interfere with national sovereignty, even if mostly on a nominal level.
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FTFY
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Slip of the tongue?
What exactly does corporate sovereignty have to do with US national sovereignty? Are not the corporate sovereignty 'courts' supposed to be independent of any country, favoring none above the others?
Their little slip-up would seem to confirm even more than before that the USG believes corporate sovereignty is meant to benefit only US corporations, and has nothing to do with helping the corporations in other countries except purely as a side-effect.
The USG sees corporate sovereignty as a way to place (US) corporations on a higher footing than national governments, just not the US government, as that would be 'interference in it's national sovereignty'. As if there really needed to be any more evidence to support the fact that the US would never honor a corporate sovereignty ruling against it. The process is meant purely to be used against non-US governments, and those governments need to realize this.
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Re: Slip of the tongue?
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Yes. This is just what warfare played out by trade representatives and bureaucrats and consulates and spies looks like. It's always been going on. Just more of the sort of stuff Manning leaked. Diplomatic Reality TV.
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Re: Slip of the tongue?
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Re: Slip of the tongue?
Title to the latter has been bought by the former. It's still named "US national sovereignty" since the name has a certain market value but the corporations have bought a controlling interest in Congress. "The People" are minority stakeholders at best.
It's sort of like Caldera Corp buying the rights to the name "SCO", renaming itself into "SCO group", then making claims about how much injustice the good old "SCO" had to endure by companies making Linux behave like UNIX. Of which Caldera was once an important one...
So yes. US national sovereignty.
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BP
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Re: BP
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but the US expects to interfere with every other nations 'National Sovereignty'! in fact the US expects to be able to dictate everything that can or cannot be done everywhere! if other nations, especially those members of the EU have got any sense at all, considering what the US wants to be able to do, they will tell the US to shove everything right up it's shit chute and go fuck itself!!
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There is a reason why more and more people become "anti-american", mainly in europe (the rest of the world alredy hates the US so it cant get much worse there).
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The U.S. Might reconsider then.
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Honestly, the US would ignore it. Given that those are two of the largest hot button issues here that's the best result. Manage to annoy the conservatives enough and you might see a minor trade war.
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will not tolerate interference in its national sovereignty.
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During the late middle ages / Renaissance...
Same same, for all his vassals and their subjects. Someone was always dying and the new heir having to make sure his peasants were still loyal.
This is where we made the transition to nations. Instead of fealty to a king, everyone hailed the flag and the land, and transition of new regents could happen more smoothly. Also the people of one province or another could concede that they were still part of the same nation, even though their respective lords were different, and were united by national patriotism.
(Just in time for religious wars.)
Corporate sovereignty seems to be a step back, putting power and law back in the hands of individual warlords, just ones with logos and boards of directors and shareholders.
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Re: During the late middle ages / Renaissance...
Actually the Romans had already made the step forward and the concept of being a Roman Citizen already meant something similar to the modern concept of nationhood. In fact it went beyond that - you could be a Jew AND a Roman Citizen (as St Paul was). The founding fathers of the US seem to have leant heavily on the Roman concept of citizenship in order to accommodate a plurality of traditions within one nation.
Now the Roman traditions did in fact continue for quite a while - principally (until 1453) in what we now refer to as the Byzantine Empire (although everyone at the time still called it the Roman empire).
The situation you describe with warlords, kings etc came about gradually as a result of the disintegration of the Roman empire in the West - so the move away from the Empire to warlords was associated with a breakdown of civilisation - not a comfortable analogy with what corporations are doing now but probably a good one.
Seeing corporations as the modern equivalents of Goths, Huns, Vikings and Vandals might be a good way to inform public policy!
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The US wants to make the laws, not have someone else make them. Laws are nothing more than rules. The US wants to make the rules (laws).
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