BuzzFeed Exposes Corporate 'Super Courts' That Can Overrule Government Courts, so powerful, neither citizens nor governments can appeal the rulings.

[My frequent catch-phrase: Corporations want to own your sorry ass. ---Bozo]

By Dave Johnson / Blog for Our Future September 1, 2016

BuzzFeed is running a very important investigative series called “Secrets of a Global Super Court.” It describes what they call “a parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone else.”

Existing “trade” agreements like NAFTA allow corporations to sue governments for passing laws and regulations that limit their profits. They set up special “corporate courts” in which corporate attorneys decide the cases. These corporate “super courts” sit above governments and their own court systems, and countries and their citizens cannot even appeal the rulings.

The 2014 post “Corporate Courts — A Big Red Flag On “Trade” Agreements” explained the origin and rationale for these corporate courts:

Picture a poor “banana republic” country ruled by a dictator and his cronies. A company might want to invest in a factory or railroad — things that would help the people of that country as well as deliver a return to the company. But the company worries that the dictator might decide to just seize the factory and give it to his brother-in-law. … Agreements to protect investors, and allowing a tribunal not based in such countries (courts where the judges are cronies of the dictator), make sense in such situations.

Here’s the thing: Corporate investors see themselves as legitimate “makers” and see citizens and voters and their governments — always demanding taxes and fair pay and public safety — to be illegitimate “takers.” Corporations are all about “one-dollar-one-vote” top-down systems of governance. They consider “one-person-one-vote” democracy to be an illegitimate, non-functional system that meddles with their more-important profit interests. They consider any governmental legal or regulatory system to be “burdensome.” They consider taxes as “theft” of the money they have “earned.”

To them, any government anywhere is just another “banana republic” from which they need special protection.

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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/buzzfeed-super-courts-overrule-government