World News

Western journalists were refused entry to an energy industry conference in Azerbaijan earlier this month, reigniting concerns over the state’s crackdown on the media ahead of crucial UN climate talks in Baku later this year.

At least three journalists from the UK and France have told the Guardian that they felt “unsafe” after they were denied entry to the Baku Energy Week forum, despite registering with the event organisers weeks in advance.

The journalists said they were not given a valid reason why they had been turned away, but they chose to leave the venue after “frightening” and “intimidating” encounters with the organisers.

The journalists left the venue after overhearing an organiser say “take them away” in Russian while on the phone. They said they believed that this was a call to the venue’s security personnel.

“When you’re in a country with no press freedom, where local journalists are jailed, you don’t mess around,” Eales said.

For centuries, there was little real distinction between trade and piracy.

“European trade with Asia, Africa, and Latin America throughout the early modern period was characterized as much by plunder as by exchange,” write Pia Eberhardt and Cecilia Olivet. The methods may have changed, these corporate-watchdog researchers argue, but the relationships haven’t. The plundering continues, by means considered legal by the powers that write the laws.

“In the 18th and 19th centuries, the governments of England, Netherlands, and France were so thoroughly involved in monitoring and protecting trading ventures that they created formal colonies and imposed European laws on subjugated territories,” Eberhardt and Olivet write. “Extracting wealth, including slaves, from other nations was standard practice.”

Trade and colonization were intertwined even earlier: after 1500, these factors were united as public-private ventures. Joint-stock companies like the (British) East India Company and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) are two of the best known. “Free trade” has always been backed by state power and the intermingling of the investor and governing classes in those states.

The state helped protect investors in the home country while projecting financial and military might far from home in the service of those investors. Those investors were, of course, typically the ruling elites themselves, who governed to protect and increase their wealth. Pace Adam Smith, there was a very visible hand of capitalism: it held a gun. The state’s gun. Usually a lot of them: “gunboat diplomacy” was another way of saying “gunboat capitalism.”

Today’s gunboat is the law. Modern pirates roam the Earth as part of the contemporary foreign investment system, extracting billions from foreign governments in claims made by transnational corporations (TNCs). This arbitration industry has, write Eberhardt and Olivet, “effectively reinstated a neocolonial regime” through the international legal system. It does so via the use of secretive legal proceedings known as investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS). Written into investment treaties—powerful states dominating weaker, or corruptly led, states—ISDS allows a corporation to blame a foreign country for their (the corporation’s) failure to extract as large a profit as anticipated in operations in that country.

“Asserting that changes in fiscal, environmental, or social policies have harmed them, TNCs have claimed that foreign governments should compensate them for the loss of potential revenues,” note Eberhardt and Olivet.

It’s an insurance system for profit, at the expense of the target country’s citizens. International investment deals challenge the ability of sovereign states to protect human rights, labor rights, public health, and the environment. In essence, the target country’s people pay twice, through “damages” to freebooting TNCs and for all the damage done to them and their future by the TNCs and the predatory financial system they represent.

ISDS cases are tried in the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID; Washington, DC); the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague); the London Court of International Arbitration; the International Chamber of Commerce (Paris); and the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.

By 1996, having been in existence for thirty years, the World Bank-based International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes was averaging slightly less than one case per year, write Eberhardt and Olivet. Since 2006, the ICSID has seen an average of thirty-seven cases per year (the other arbitration courts have also seen big increases). The increase is the result of two factors. First, the number of both bilateral and multilateral trade agreements have skyrocketed. There were some 400 of these in 1988; in 2016 there were more than 3,300. Second, TNCs have “become much more aggressive seeking arbitration,” with law firms, financiers, and arbitrators scouring the world looking for cases.

“Claims of $100 million are now so commonplace as to escape notice,” write the authors, and claims surpassing $1 billion are not as unusual as they used to be. The top twelve respondent states (in 2017) were Argentina, Venezuela, the Czech Republic, Spain, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Ecuador, Poland, India, and Ukraine.

“Governments of dozens of nations have been challenged for adopting taxes, fiscal policies, bans on harmful chemicals, bans on mining, requirements for environmental impact assessments, or regulations relating to hazardous wastes,” the authors explain. Local courts may be bypassed completely, as “arbitration panels are strongly biased in favor of private companies.”

Corporations win most of the time. Those “awards are usually paid by governments, which must pay to prevent seizure of state property, including bank accounts in other countries.” And there is no formal appeals process.

Colonialism pioneered international wealth extraction. Neocolonialism continues the process in more subtle, but just as devastating, ways.

NYTimes gift article, no paywall

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17423369

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17414080

BNEI BRAK, Israel (AP) — Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men blocked a major highway in central Israel for two hours on Thursday to protest a recent Supreme Court decision ordering young religious men to enlist for military service.

Military service is compulsory for most Jewish men and women in Israel. But politically powerful ultra-Orthodox parties have won draft exemptions for their followers that allow them instead to study in religious seminaries.

This long-standing arrangement has bred widespread resentment among the broader public — a sentiment that has grown stronger during the eight-month war against Hamas in Gaza. Over 600 soldiers have been killed, and tens of thousands of reservists have been activated, straining careers, businesses and family lives.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday announced five additional members of her future cabinet, presenting a group of scientists and former colleagues including Luz Elena González, an expert in sustainable development, as the next secretary of energy.

Sheinbaum highlighted González’s experience in renewable energy and in handling finances, an area that will prove useful in the department’s relationship with state-run companies like oil giant Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission. Previous to her appointment, González was in charge of Mexico City’s finances.

Sheinbaum also appointed Raquel Buenrostro as secretary of public administration. Buenrostro, who served for more than two decades in government tax, treasury and economic agencies, was described by the future president as an “incorruptible woman” with 28 years of experience in public administration.

Israeli soldiers have destroyed 11 homes and other structures in an isolated community in the occupied West Bank, leaving 50 people homeless, amid a reported uptick in house demolitions and spiralling violence in the Palestinian territory.

Contractors with bulldozers accompanied by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops arrived in Umm al-Kheir, a village mostly home to shepherds, on Wednesday morning and demolished six houses, tent residences, an electricity generator, solar cells and water tanks, according to residents and Israeli activists who documented the proceedings. Agricultural land and fences were also damaged and trees uprooted.

The demolition has destroyed about a third of the village’s infrastructure.

In the shopping streets and housing estates of the south London town of Croydon, some once-derelict buildings are slowly coming back to life.

At a former school, peeling walls are getting a fresh coat of paint, and laundry hangs on a line to dry. Over at a disused youth centre, there is laughter in the gymnasium-turned-dormitory, and a vase of purple flowers decorates a scrubbed kitchen counter.

The Reclaim Croydon collective, a squatters’ group, has taken over disused commercial premises to provide beds for the homeless, saying it is providing a community-based solution to a broken housing market.

“The government is failing homeless people,” said one of the youth centre’s new occupants, who goes by the name Leaf.

“If the people in charge actually gave a damn about anyone who was struggling, they would make those houses habitable,” Leaf said. “Homelessness is a direct political choice.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17418031