Trudeau/Freeland hide dirty NAFTA Ch. 11 behind Filler-fluff Ch.19
Ottawa is noticeably quiet on a core U.S. demand to discontinue the undemocratic Chapter 11, a position forced by broad resistance.
All the while Trudeau/Freeland are insisting to keep Ch. 11, despite it having not even marginally to do with trade, unlike Ch. 19 and Ch. 20.
Remarkably so as under Ch. 11 American cartels negotiate from our government billions of dollars as reward for breaking Canadian laws. In zero reciprocity we never benefitted a single cent from the U.S. acc. to gov. info https://is.gd/9d4tvc .
Why this treasonous behaviour of Trudeau and Freeland, reminiscent of Brian Mulroney’s (Freeland's newly appointed NAFTA advisor) sell-out of Canadian interests?
Defending the Ch. 11 standard in NAFTA also upholds Canada’s racist bully status in globalization deals with poor countries, specifically shielding and rewarding death squad, rape, deportation, land theft collusion and other criminal activities of Canadian mining.
Richard Swift in the spring 2018 issue of Canadian Dimension observed that the NAFTA Ch. 11 principle of illegal/extralegal investor state arbitration privileges is enshrined essence of a multitude of bilateral so called free trade deals.
“The fix is in on investor state dispute settlement systems [article headline pp. 22/23]
The Canadian Impact [subsection]
[beginning of continuous quote] ... The U.S. has never lost an investor suit under NAFTA. There is every reason to believe that the Trudeau government’s support for Chapter 11 and willingness to pay up is encouraging the increasing number of investor claims against the country.
A few of these cases give an idea of the way in which Canada’s regulatory regime is a target for these suits. The Ethyl Corporation sued over the banning of what was considered a gasoline additive dangerous to public health.
S.B. Myers challenged a temporary Canadian ban on the export of toxic PCB wastes. Lone Pine Resources (a Canadian company using its U.S. subsidiary) sued over Quebec’s moratorium on fracking.
Other lost cases related to futile attempts to claw back some of the advantages from selling Canada’s resources — two notable ones were the refusal of U.S.-based Mobil Oil [currently double dipping with a rerun of the very same extortion against Canada] to contribute to R&D and education and training as part of its offshore projects in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Another was a loss to AbitibiBowater (now Resolute Forest Products) for trying to take back lumber and water rights after the timber giant had shut down its last mill, also in Newfoundland.
But perhaps the official enthusiasm for ISDS provisions in Ottawa is the fact that successive Canadian governments are in the back pocket of the Canadian mining sector.
Several mining companies have sued under these provisions, including a suit for 4.4 billion by notorious Gabriel Resources against the Romanian government, which is desperately trying to protect the precious Rosa Montana region against a large open-pit gold and silver mine.
Other suits have been brought by Canadian “miners” against Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala and many other countries. To date mining companies have sued over 40 governments a total of 100 times under these obscure trade-treaty provisions.
Forget about human and worker rights and environmental standards. By most estimates, nearly three-quarters of the global mining industry is Canadian-based.” [end of quote]
So called globalized free trade is all about a gangster agenda of race and class, effectively targeting for destruction Canada’s inter-cultural deep-law foundations, towards becoming another U.S. colony (Alberta Premiers lead the way and routinely consult with the White House in Washington, D.C.).
Under attack from within, Canada is unique among Western countries with their more or less European race-based, single-language, single religion ideals.
However, Ch. 11 has contributed to a political environment with a severe chill effect against legislating or even holding on to civic, environmental and economic development rights that benefit people.
Life support systems such as drinking and ground water qualities are falling apart, child poverty is an international disgrace, predatory debts and structural unemployment are ballooning, incomes are declining.
Flash-points are a recolonizing of First Nations as pipeline hostages, and an anti-renewable carbon-tax Wall Street program that financializes bankster privileges in tandem with subsidizing an impoverishing, zero net-return tar and frack expansion.
Off course the neoliberal ideologues disagree and claim, all we wanted is peace, joy and pancakes. The 4th century BC philosopher Aristotle may have reminded them: To hell with excuses and psychobabble, plot is character;
Neoliberals have earned their mess and own it. They are the ones in charge for 45 years since they largely destroyed, or perverted back to colonialism, the UN and Bretton Woods postwar institutions along with then imperfect but positive fairness ambitions.
Late Milton Friedman deserves special credit as prominent voice for the Chicago school of economics, and as Nobel Laureate imposter with his actually received award from the Swedish central bank.
On 10 April 1947 in the Hotel du Parc in Pelerin, Switzerland Friedman had released a “Neoliberalism” doctrine that attempted to rescue, by renaming it, Mussolini’s version of colonialism through “Corporatism”.
On 10 April 1947 in the Hotel du Parc in Pelerin, Switzerland Friedman had released a “Neoliberalism” doctrine that attempted to rescue, by renaming it, Mussolini’s invention of “Corporatism” paired with neocolonialism.
Friedman deceptively claimed to follow the path of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith by unleashing a social darwinism of elite privileges as a free market.
When in reality Smith had insisted that markets are to be regulated by (ethical) political leadership, not the other around.
And that markets flourish when free of an uncompetitive (Friedman like) burden of rentier class scenarios dominated by slum lords, loan sharks and neo-feudal finance speculators.
During the 1970s Friedman became a senior advisor to the murder and torture regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile which true to his neoliberal dogma he referred to as “Miracle of Chile”.
How did the extremist hack’s organized crime program arrive on the main stage, with specialties such as NAFTA Chapter 11 like provisions through which corporate cartels get to de facto legislate through nullifying laws passed by parliaments? Reagan, Clinton, Thatcher, Kohl and Blair put it there.
Especially in recent weeks and months even neoliberal mainstream media have widely noted that dispute resolution, with regard to U.S. tariffs against Canadian softwood lumber, metals, automotive and other exports, under the still active fall-back GATT/WTO rules scenario, had been relatively more successful.
Further exposing NAFTA Chapters 19/20 as filler-fluff provisions to mask organized crime and treason under Ch. 11.
Ch. 11’s UNCITRAL arbitration rules are tilted towards extending U.S. corporate legal structures and drawing in U.S. friendly lawyers as panel judges.
The text of NAFTA Ch. 11 mentions government “measure” 35 times, carefully probing for attack every conceivable nuance of responsible, lawful government to be dismantled.
Peter Becker, Whitehorse,
(Donations Welcome paypal.me/yukonblogger )
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