After protests pushed Bolivia’s leaders to reverse the privatization, Bechtel sued Bolivia for $50 million, although it had invested just $1 million in the project. This was a massive public uprising against the privatization of the city’s water and subsequent rate hikes for residents. Who uses these secretive tribunals? The San Francisco-based engineering giant Bechtel sued Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, after the Cochabamba Water Revolt of 2000. Companies can force compensation not only for the funds they actually invested, but for many, many times more than that for supposed “lost profits.” Companies are allowed to drag governments before closed-door tribunals operated by the World Bank, the International Chamber of Commerce, and others. Tucked neatly away inside the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and more than 90 percent of the thousands of other international trade agreements in force around the world are provisions that allow foreign corporations to sue governments whenever a change in policy interferes with the company’s profit-making plans. Here is how the system known as “Investor State Dispute Settlement” works. How can the company do this? TransCanada is making use of a legal weapon so powerful that even Darth Vader would be envious-international trade rules. taxpayers compensate it for the profits it had hoped to make from a pipeline it won’t get to build. True to form, TransCanada filed a $15 billion legal action against the U.S. authorization for the pipeline to be built-the political equivalent of blowing up the Death Star’s thermal oscillator.īut as any good Star Wars fan knows, the Empire strikes back. Those efforts paid off last November, when President Barack Obama announced that he was denying the required U.S. In the Keystone saga, pluck and grit came in the form of protests, lawsuits, arrests, and the encirclement of the White House-the equivalent of a Jedi counter-attack. The pipeline, not unlike a Death Star, threatened the planet because it would have amped up carbon emissions and quickened the pace of global climate change. TransCanada (playing the role of the Empire) sought to build a metal tunnel from Alberta to the Gulf Coast to transport oil from the Canadian tar sands. The political saga of the Keystone XL pipeline has followed essentially the same plot. The bad guys build a Death Star machine that can kill whole planets, the good guys fight back with pluck and grit, and, just in the nick of time, destroy the machine. It just makes me laugh.In case you didn’t notice, the new blockbuster Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, ends pretty much the same way the first one did when it came out in the summer of 1977. The Nate McLouth GIF doesn't even need any background. And yet there is Bud, running off the mound before the umpire even calls strike three. I say audacity because if you read the background on the situation when the GIF went up in the second round, you know that Bud Norris vs lefties isn't exactly something to feel confident in. Today's match up pits the hilarity of people falling down with the the audacity of Bud Norris. Today's winner will face off with stupid Mount Crushmore in the second-half finals, and the winner of that will go up against the Markakis Home Run Girl for the overall title. If we do another GIF tournament in the future, we'll have to figure out a way that GIFs like that don't even make it in.Īnyway. If I were looking at all of the great Orioles GIFs we saw in the second half of the season and picking my top 12, Mount Crushmore wouldn't have even made it, and now our tournament is being ruined by ballot stuffing for it. But other than Mount Crushmore they have been voted out early. The week that the Mount Crushmore GIF won, Aaron started off the post with, "It's not a bumper crop of GIFs this week." When you post a weekly GIFs post, they won't all be legendary, and sometimes some not great GIFs make their way into the tournament. This is our second GIF tournament and for both I've taken the winners from every GIFs of the Week post and pitted them against each other. Maybe some jerk thinks it's hysterical to vote, clear his cookies, and vote again five hundred times. Maybe the person who made the sign found us and is forcing everyone he or she knows to vote. We're obviously being trolled or spammed, and for what reason I just don't know because it's a totally ridiculous thing to care about. The Mount Crushmore debacle has ruined this entire tournament for me. I'll be honest with you, I didn't have much motivation to create today's post.
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