How The Ultra-Rich Get Away With Everything

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Riddick
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How The Ultra-Rich Get Away With Everything

Post by Riddick » 09-02-2016 12:56 AM

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THE COURT THAT RULES THE WORLD

Imagine a parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone else, allowing executives convicted of crimes to go scott-free.

Imagine a court so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The BuzzFeed News investigation will show how the mere threat of an ISDS case can intimidate a nation into gutting its own laws, how some financial firms have transformed what was intended to be a system of justice into an engine of profit, and how America is surprisingly vulnerable to suits from foreign companies.

In the first of a multipart series, Chris Hamby reveals the private "global super court" that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will. STORY | FULL SERIES
A mind should not be so open that the brains fall out; however, it should not be so closed that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. ART BELL

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