Under the Radar - How Corporations Use Global Investment Rul

[Oscar]

Unfair, Unsustainable and Under the Radar - How Corporations Use Global Investment Rules to Undermine a Sustainable Future

[ http://democracyctr.org/wp/wp-content/u ... _Final.pdf ]

by Thomas McDonagh
A publication from Democracy Centre http://democracyctr.org/

About the Publication (24 pages)

The Author

Thomas is originally from Dublin, Ireland. He obtained his masters degree from the School of Politics & International Relations at University College Dublin in 2006. He has worked at various grassroots organisations in Latin America including research and communications support for a Colombian food sovereignty campaign in 2011. He has worked at the Democracy Center in Bolivia since early 2012 where he coordinates the Network for Justice in Global Investment, assists with advocacy training projects and provides research support for the Center’s climate change work.

FOREWORD

As Thomas Mc Donagh writes in this report, one of the fundamental global challenges that we face in this century is how to do two things simultaneously. One is enable billions of people across the world to lift themselves from the sufferings of poverty and the other is avoid pushing the planet off a cliff toward dangerous and irreversible environmental changes. Under any circumstances doing both these things would be difficult, but there is also a set of powerful forces at work that make what is difficult and urgent almost impossible. These forces are the powerful international corporations that seem set to autopilot on a course that wreaks havoc on our environment.

These corporations – oil conglomerates, coal companies, mining operations, and others – are directed by people and backed by sources of capital that shift and change by the hour. But what remains permanent is the set of programmed commands that drive their decision-making: to maximise the earnings of their shareholders and executives even if that comes at the expense of irreversible damage to the planet. To be sure, there are thousands of honest businesses in the world that do not operate in just this way, but in the behaviour of some of the largest it is easy to see exactly this kind of profit-seeking programming run amok.

This report is about one of the most important yet little understood weapons that these corporations have constructed to defend themselves from challenge: a vast global web of international trade and investment agreements and a corporate-friendly tribunal system designed to enforce the rights that those agreements grant to corporations.

Consider this scenario: as you pull up to a traffic light two police officers on motorcycles stop on either side of you. One officer commands you to go on the green light. The officer on the other side calls out for you to go on the red. Which one do you listen to? Today many governments are caught in just this position in debates over how to steer their nation’s economic and social development. From one side comes the demand from citizens, social movements and international agreements to adopt a course of "sustainable development" – an approach based on protecting the earth for future generations. From the other side come global corporations demanding unhindered access to mineral and metal mining, private control of water, nuclear development, and other profit-making ventures.

The power balance between the two, however, could hardly be more lopsided. In the end advocates for sustainable development policies can do little more than advocate, and the international agreements that back them have no actual authority or teeth. International corporations, on the other hand, can force governments before international investment tribunals and compel them to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. In short, the police officer on one side can do little more than yell, but the other can write a very expensive ticket.

The result is a system that undermines democracy and poses a very serious threat to the future.

For more than two decades the Democracy Center has worked with citizen activists across the world to help them understand the public issues that impact their lives and to have an influence on those public decisions. Our work on international investment rules began when one of the most significant cases brought under this system – the Bechtel Corporation’s $50 million suit against Bolivians after the Cochabamba Water Revolt – happened on our doorstep. The Democracy Center helped lead the global effort that forced Bechtel to drop the case. That experience underscored how some of the threats to our democracy are carefully disguised in complexity and it is in these cases that better citizen understanding is especially urgent.

The report you are about to read examines this conflict between sustainable development and international investment rules. At the Democracy Center we believe deeply in the potential power that activist democracy always offers us to shape our world. We hope this report moves and inspires others to join the effort to dismantle a system that is designed to keep that activist democracy out of some of the most important decisions of our time.

Jim Shultz
Executive Director
The Democracy Center
http://democracyctr.org/

FULL REPORT:
[ http://democracyctr.org/wp/wp-content/u ... _Final.pdf ]