Like the IMF, The World Bank, The UN and other multi national fora, the WTO is an instrument of US (and NATO) Policy to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of everybody else. I launched a book on the subject by Jagjeet Kaur Plahe at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Nairobi, in 1999 when I was Ombudsman for East Africa and Chairman of the East African Internet Association.
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The sad thing is this wont help US based solar manufactures one bit. All it will do is drive the Indians to buy the lowest cost solar panels which come from China. This was a stupid move on our part.
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Well, the Indian taxpayers may be grateful, especially if this was (as it seems on the surface) a boondoggle.
Cory never misses a chance to overstate things. None of his articles should be taken at face value.
As best I can tell, type of government is only an indirect influence on corporate hostility: an authoritarian government with populist or communist tendencies will certainly arouse corporate ire(and possibly a coup attempt, depending on how influential the corporation theyâve displeased is); while an at least nominally democratic government that more or less hews to neoliberal policy will not.
It is an indirect influence, though, since democracies tend to motivate politicians to respond to public opinion(or at least the opinion of certain parts of the public) relatively quickly; while dictatorships can ignore substantial discontent until it becomes an existential threat, so democracies are probably more likely to respond to popular displeasure by acting against specific projects; while dictatorships are more likely to be either uniformly friendly or uniformly hostile(depending on whether they are hard right or hard left) to corporate interests.
This is the TTIP wayâŚ
You have a proposal.? We can sue you because we donât think you have selected the lowest bidder fairly.
You want to build it in your country uslig local labour. We can sue you for not selecting the lowest bidder in the proper way.
You want to build it without using imported Chinese solar panels? We can sue you for using anti-competititive building practices, and then we buy the panels from the Chinese and sell then to you.
You still not want to buy our product. We can change the figures slightly and sue you again. Each time, you have to pay for your defence. What is the cheapest product? Ours is, and you are going to go on getting sued until you buy it.
Indeed, in the UK, the Government has reserved some executive powers to override local councils who to do not come to the ârightâ decision about fracking projects quickly enough. They can still object, but that gets them sued. But they donât have the opportunity to sit on the paperwork any longer. Why has the Government done this? In preparation for TTIP.
And to top it all, the US has a good giggle about how corrupt the Indians are, and how they cannot organise a simple solar project.
Nope. Canât follow you there, Iâm afraid.
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The whole idea in a free trade agreement is to have a bidding process in which the lowest cost option is chosen, irrespective of where it is produced (still within the treaty members). Otherwise it can be interpreted as a protectionist deal. Thatâs what happened here. But if you want to give it an anti US spin, whatever⌠This happens in EU daily.
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with the nice spin that governmental buyers/customers are entitled to use the most economical offer - as this is nearly impossible to qualify the cheapest* one is chosen.
* until the contract winner finds reasons for additional claims
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Ontario wind and solar person here ⌠the Ontario FIT projects were not forced to be put out to tender. The awarded contracts were allowed to stand, but later revisions of the FIT contracts had greatly reduced domestic content requirements.
Ontario could have avoided the WTO ruling (brought by Japan) if it had done either:
- owned part of the projects, or
- specified particular regional development goals (as Quebec does in its domestic content for renewable energy contracts).
Government ownership and regional development goals are protected under trade agreements.
When these solar projects go ahead in India, itâs likely that solar module fabrication will be done locally. Cells are typically cast and processed in China, but if demand is high enough, module encapsulation/framing can be done locally very cheaply. The plants are modular and quick to set up.
Free trade is great until you or your friends lose their job from it. Iâm glad I got to see most of the Ontario wind and solar factories (from huge, like the wind turbine blade fabs, to the tiny, like the solar post finishing done as piecework on Mennonite farms) while it was still around.
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A proper bidding process doesnât need to have price as its sole criterion. Maybe a better wording of the projectâs goals and of the bidding criteria could have shielded it from that.
Why is that our concern? Are we supposed to go around everyone else how to run their countries? Should we just take them all over and impose our preferred government for them?
Doesnât mean there isnât corruption? Just look at many police departments or the state of the American congress.
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Thanks for injecting a significant amount of fact into my speculations. Much appreciated!
Actually, if a company can make a buck while combating financial (or physical) abuses, Iâm all for it. Using a countryâs own legal system (and letâs remember none of these treaties have force unless governments choose to sign them) in order to combat abuses is exactly what I like to see. And if those are external (such as when Amnesty came after the Canadian government for its abominable treatment of aboriginals), Iâm delighted as theyâre often not as easy to suppress as local sources.
Of course not. But thereâs a tendency to equate some corruption with the standard that much of the world faces, where you can expect to pay bribes throughout the day for any government service. Likewise, itâs worth remembering that despite there being real political suppression and corruption, itâs nothing on the same order of what people face elsewhere.
Perhaps to understand out real position is to invite complacency, but I cannot help feel that making facile comparisons (not that you have done so, but not unknown among other posters here) in some way diminishes the real hardship of corruption and political suppression that others face the world over.
By the way, as an aside, I am, as always, appreciative of the time and effort that you take to engage in these conversations. I do quite enjoy them. If at any point I am too bombastic and offend, please point out my misbehavior. I would hate to step over a rhetorical edge and and truly offend.
(Except for that fellow and his âtrue equalityâ comment. Still simmering about that :-).)
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According to my Japanese friend, indeed, the Japanese want to eat Japanese rice.
What happened during that dispute is that some brands of rice were sold with a small amount of American rice, but to meet the letter of the law, they separated the American rice into a separate packet.
Most Japanese that bought the Japanese-American mix did so because it was quite a bit cheaper by the pound, but then tossed out the packet of American rice.
ETA: Doesnât quite confirm the story I heard, but holy hell:
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I wouldnât be too surprised, as the LDP government which has ruled Japan since WWII (with the odd recent break) depends on rice farmers (who of course have massive disproportionate voting power as in most countries) to keep their eternal majority. They push very hard that foreign foods are of questionable safety (Japanese digestive systems require unique Japanese grown food) although occasionally they tend to dabble with dog-whistling âcan you really trust food grown by those other races, or even worse, Koreansâ
Occasionally they get surprised when the Japanese people indicate they might not mind raising their standard of living by buying cheaper foreign goods, but when that happens, the government has usually been pretty quick to close the loopholes before thereâs too much contamination.
(Caveat: my information comes from Japanese visitors and expatriates, who may be prone to some exaggeration.)
Which just goes to show what âfree trade principlesâ are âgoodâ for.
For the same and obvious reasons that overweight people have a greater need to exercise than healthy-weight people who are already better than them at exercising. âBut fatso over there is no good at exercising! He should pay me to do it for him! Competitive advantage! Disruption! Uber!â
On an individual basis, a contract can be voided through a legal proceeding if a court agrees that you were tricked or coerced into signing it, or that the contract is somehow unfair or unenforceable. Personally, I usually assume that the party with more power ended up on the better side of the contract and align my sympathies accordingly.
One could even argue that the whole point of the concept of a âcontractâ is exploitation. A win-win situation should already be in a pretty stable equilibrium. Why does it also need to be âenforceableâ?
Doesnât this seemâŚoh, I donât knowâŚwrong, somehow?
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