4 ms·

Eventually it comes down to the same thing. No country can afford to pay continuing ongoing fines and compensations. So they will have to change the laws.

• mike_hearn 12y ago
  Or just not pay the fines. Companies can't "force" countries to do anything, the idea is hilarious. Countries have police and jails and armies. Corporations have got nothing. They may nonetheless choose to pay the fines because they feel the overall framework is generally beneficial even if they chose to feel the pain in that specific case. Namely, their citizens want jobs and a growing economy, and companies want a predictable and stable business environment. In particular one thing they do NOT want is to spend years building a business in a country and then discover that some politicians have decided to try and grab a few quick votes by quickly passing some badly thought out "anti-Foo" law. See: UK and their new set of "anti Google" laws. That's the fundamental idea behind all this: countries and their trade negotiators know that their political masters are seen as flaky and unreliable by CEOs, which discourages trade and investment. So tribunals where companies could get compensated seems like one way to try and tackle that problem.
  • prawn 12y ago
    Companies can't "force" countries to do anything, the idea is hilarious. Countries have police and jails and armies. Corporations have got nothing. Corporations have got media clout/ownership, threats of capital flight, lobbyists and so on.
    • mike_hearn 12y ago
      The vast majority of all corporations don't own any media. Lobbying isn't some magic form of mind control: it's just them presenting their case to the government, which is free to ignore them and routinely does. Threat of capital flight is really just "if you screw us over we'll try and leave" which is hardly any power at all, especially as often companies can't leave because they have huge fixed assets there. Really, corporations have no power at all. They have the power to speak and maybe to leave. Whereas governments can do whatever they like.
      • Retra 12y ago
        That's really unrealistic. Governments are run by people -- who can be influenced fairly easily.
      • prawn 12y ago
        I live in Australia. We could've used the Minerals Resource Rent Tax to build a sovereign fund similar to Norway's StatOil during our so-called mining boom. Instead, mining companies and business interests threatened to invest elsewhere and the tax was ditched. Capital flight is a very powerful tool.
        • mike_hearn 12y ago
          StatOil is a state owned oil company. Australia could have created a state owned mining company, if that had really been a problem. I guess it preferred not to.
          • prawn 12y ago
            And how would that have gone down with exactly the same opponents?
            • mike_hearn 12y ago
              It wouldn't, but who cares? If they weren't willing to mine, then Australia could have built its own mining company. It would have taken longer but state owned resource extraction companies are common, it's clearly not politically or technically impossible.
  • JupiterMoon 12y ago
    However, corporations have governments in their pockets - and via these they can control when required the police, jails and armies of countries.... See e.g. war in Iraq. TPP itself. Also TTIP.