this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
36 points (95.0% liked)

Europe

8496 readers
5 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] SierpinskiDreieck@feddit.de 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Okay strap in this gets wild:

I am currently reading "Silent Coup" - very interesting book.

It talks about the international mechanisms by which we legally took the sovereignity of nation states.

As byproduct of free trade agreements most countries are liable to be sued by foreign companies. There are absurd cases where forein investors undermine democratic decisions in order to ensure their pofit interests.

South Africa - for example - after ending Apartheid wanted to change the deal with diamond mining rights. They wanted to add a tax to ensure that black people get a fair share of the wealth extracted from their soil. But one italian multinational didn't like this - so they sued and won. SA wanted to keep this as silent as possible so that no other company would sue. But they had to grant them a huge cut: from 26% of profits to 5%.

Many other examples, this one just stood out to me.

On first glance it seems absurd that some company can sue a sovereign country over democratic decisions, but this is the world we live in. Fuck free trade agreements, fuck coorporations, fuck the whole World Bank & Breton Woods machinery.

https://www.counterfire.org/article/silent-coup-how-corporations-overthrew-democracy-book-review/

https://icsid.worldbank.org/cases/case-database/case-detail?CaseNo=ARB(AF)/07/1