'“Please consider how crazy this system is,” Boyd told delegates from scores of nations attending the hearing. “States that are trying to tackle the climate and environmental crisis and safeguard the human rights of their people are being forced to pay billions of dollars in compensation to the very corporations that have caused this crisis. Instead of making polluters pay, states are paying polluters.”
We need a political moment campaigning on regaining our sovereignty in the face of the neo-colonialists: US/multinational corporations. I think I know a party or three who might be well aligned to create one, if they can get their heads around this. I'm happy to help them. So, I suspect, is Prof Jane Kelsey.
@alcinnz demonstrate that those who supported it were oblivious, inept, and succumbed to fluffy marketing that flew in the face of all the principles of democratic society?
@alcinnz@lightweight
my sense is that even though the World Bank Group Ease Of Doing Business rankings were discontinued because they just predicted countries were worse,
I think that participating in any of the business friendly promotional astroturf is a disaster for trying to do good here and any nz campaign would need to actively fight against promoted beliefs and approaches encouraged by that index, albeit that index almost defines the controlling interest of nz.
I just prefer strategies which involve getting our hands dirty & making the change ourselves without relying on government being involved. That's a necessary component of making NZ more self-sufficient.
Though if you want to change laws & trade agreements, yeah... That's a place for advocacy!
@alcinnz@lightweight
I'm writing a https://veilid.com/#veilid implementation at the moment which resists corporate profiteering influences on communication. Do you think we could communicate over veilid about how great the remaining environment here is, and organising to save what we can? I don't even have a tenuous connection to NZ despite living here, so I am excited to find there are sensible people here too.
@alcinnz
I'm pretty hard to contact! This might be why no-one contacts me ;p. Veilid's reference implementation gets packaged for Debian and Fedora and for building into iphone and android apps. Actually I am pulling myself into it by my own hair with this implementation.
How do you like to be communed with (other than mastodon tooting)? I'm in Hamz. @lightweight
@alcinnz on a more serious note (although I stand by my previous glib response) we provide a compelling narrative with ample evidence, like that cited in the Inside Climate News article) that helps propagate a correct characterisation of the situation we're in, ensuring that those to blame are carefully and accurately identified throughout.
@lightweight It's not like we didn't see this coming. Prof Kelsey explicitly warned that ISDS would make legislation against and regulation of climate-damaging activities fraught.
@phil_stevens yup. I was horrified by the complicity of the NZ media & the utter non-engagement from all but a few politicians. I had a 1 hr discussion about it with my local MP (Nat'l's Nicky Wagner) who said "but Tim Grocer's such a nice man & he said the #TPPA is good for NZ, so I'm voting for it". Most MPs were similarly complicit. I told my subsequent MP, Duncan Webb, to his face, that if he voted for NZ to ratify the #CPTPPA, he was a traitor to NZers. I fully stand by that.
@lightweight The way those wide-eyed toddlers believed Groser's baldfaced lies. "The US will buy our dairy products!"
They produce 5x times as much as we do. They never did want to buy our milk and they never will.
"ISDS only sound bad when leftie law professors assume worst-case scenarios. None of that would actually happen!"
It's happening now, and it was then (San Luis Potosi under NAFTA, for example). Corporations are amoral and will never do the right thing if it means lost profits.
@alcinnz yup. Not democratically elected, and not correct in their analysis (one assured Jacinda Ardern that the CPTPPA wouldn't have legal implications for NZ due to the ISDS terms. He was dead wrong. She decided to support it on his assurances. Both of them are the real problem, as is David Parker for pushing it in the first place - he clearly didn't understand it - or, if he did, even more damning).
Add comment