Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
Are there two sides to economic zones, or is it mainly always going to be in favor of corporations? #addto/questions
Highlights
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You may not have heard of the area of international law known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), through which private corporations are able to sue governments that implement legislation that constrains their profits. But this private parallel legal infrastructure is one of the greatest threats to progressive governments all over the world.
✏️ What the fuck? 🔗 View Highlight
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If, say, a government attempted to force an international fossil fuel company to clean up after an oil spill, or introduced measures to disincentivize smoking, those governments could be sued by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries respectively.
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Wealthy states, home to powerful multinational corporations, have worked outside of the multilateral system to agree these treaties, pushing less powerful countries to agree to the inclusion of ISDS provisions if they want access to markets in the rich world.
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the Economist, which wrote:
If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking, protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties over the past half century have done.
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SEZs come in all shapes and sizes, but they are based on a similar logic. Governments create quasi-autonomous areas within the states they govern, able to implement tax and regulatory policies different to those that apply in the rest of the country. Governments often parcel up their sovereignty in this way in the hope that doing so will attract inward investment and create jobs, while preserving existing tax and regulation in the rest of the economy.
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If SEZs could be established all over the world, complete with low taxes and corporate-friendly regulation, investment could be sucked out of social democratic states and into these free market paradises.
✏️ These economic zones are basically a quick and dirty way of establishing heavy neoliberal capitalism in socially democratic states. Anywhere that’s too friendly to the people and too strict on governments won’t be able to attract strong investments, so these zones pull investment into them and benefit just the corps above all else. 🔗 View Highlight
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The zone is, in other words, a powerful disciplining tool that can be used to bludgeon states into adopting neoliberal policies.
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Castro kept her promise to repeal the ZEDE laws that allowed Honduras Próspera to establish its private libertarian city-state on the island of Roatán. Congress unanimously agreed that the ZEDEs represented a breach of Honduras’s sovereignty.
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a form of “corporate colonialism”