When Corporations Sue States: The Exploitation Trap
In this video we discuss obscure legal mechanisms in international financial treaties that allow corporations to sue states for lost profits
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Bibliography
Blair, V. (2025). The Metals Pie. New Internationalist, 555.
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Paddison, L. (2024). How a US mining firm sued Mexico for billions – for trying to protect its own seabed. The Guardian. [online] 31 Jan. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/31/how-a-us-mining-firm-sued-mexico-for-billions-for-trying-to-protect-its-own-seabed.
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9 Comments
I would love to watch the preview, but I'm committed to participating in my town's Pride celebration.
I'm amazed this doesn't get more attention. I've been infuriated by it since I first heard of it – the Empire using trade deals and court systems to strip nations of their sovereignty. Absolute madness.
How much better would society function if being a CEO or on a board of directors was a capital (haha) offense? I imagine society would be far more pleasant.
Capital is, absolutely, evil. Even if we're able to overthrow this hideous and cancerous system, irreversible damage as already been done to our biosphere. Per the conservative IPCC in 2019. So very sad… 😢
It looks like your comments are getting spammed. But re: the video, the arguments you cited in favor this system present them as the ordinary functioning of the rule of law. But I assume these arbitration courts are kept secret precisely because they know the outrage that would result if the proceedings were made public. Do the defenders of the system admit this, or do they have some other excuse for secrecy? Personally I think every representative of these corporations should be deeply afraid of showing their face in public… because someone like me might wish to engage them in civil discussion, of course. 😉
The idea that you can sue for lost potential profits is truly one of the most dystopian signs for our inability to control what large corporations can be held accountable too, yikes, instead of the state controlling the company, the company controls the state.
Is it possible for Mexico to counter-sue?
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
People often find modern imperialism from the core at least abstractly, this is a good instructional tool for how it actually looks. Nkrumah's "Neo-colonialism" looks at similar cases in the post-war period, dense and challenging but worthwhile.