And another TPP of the hat

Debris at Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais, after the dam collapse. Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters via The Guardian (which along with a number of sources spells "Rodrigues" without its second r).

Erik Loomis reports, and there's more information and pictures at greenpeace, on a dam collapse in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on November 5, releasing millions of cubic feet of mining waste, mud poisoned with arsenic, lead, chromium, and other heavy metals—more than "25,000 Olympic swimming pools"—into the mining community of Mariana, where it has killed at least 17 people and displaced hundreds more, and that's just the beginning:

The mud surged through rural communities and into the Rio Doce, the major river in southeast Brazil. Since November 5th, it has been slowly working its way downstream — contaminating the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people and turning protected forest and habitat into a desert of mud. The tragedy will continue to spread over 500 kilometers as contaminants from the sludge make their way towards the Atlantic coast, eventually endangering the Abrolhos National Marine Park. 

Loomis notes,

Brazil has issued a preliminary fine of $66 million and that will no doubt be higher in the end. But Brazil has also gone straight ahead with its modernization program that includes cutting down the Amazon for cattle ranchers and allowing mining companies to do basically whatever they want to. The government might act in a time of crisis like this, but it’s opened itself to resource extraction as its path to modernization, whether the government is right or left... It would be nice if the voters held [president Dilma] Rousseff accountable, but given the power of the mining companies, it’s unlikely that there are going to be any successful anti-mining political movements.

And it suddenly occurred to me that in a better world there might be something that could be done in a case like this.

The TPPing point

Now updated with Paraguayan Super Snacks

Invasion of foreign ketchup. Indonesian kecap manis, via Roda Dua.

An exchange at LGM started off like this, and my riposte to Erik Loomis's rejoinders got too long to post there, so here it is.

Yastreblyansky says:

June 24, 2015 at 10:13 am

Maybe the worst thing about the way this debate is being conducted is the continual speculation over what ISDS mechanisms “will” do in the event the TPP is passed, as if the idea were a novelty that has never been tried before. There are some 3200 bilateral investment treaties using ISDS, in which the US has a track record going back to 1982 and belongs to some 50 treaties with ISDS provisions. If you’d like to investigate what the ISDS process has done, some helpful factual documents are here and here.

These help to explain why there has never been an outcry in the US over ISDS before now; there’s never been anything to cry out over. The US government has never lost a case. The resolution can impose money damages only, it cannot overturn legislation. The most frequently sued countries are the countries with the most inefficient legal systems: Argentina, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ecuador, and India in that order; the process starts only if the local legal system fails to find a resolution (there have been cases, like the Hong Kong Philip Morris suits against Australia and Uruguay, where big corporate money has been able to keep a suit going for an incredibly long and expensive time, but they still have not won).

It is very painful and weird for me to be in disagreement with the entire labor movement on this issue, but the fear of ISDS is just not rational. We’ve already had it for years and it isn’t a problem.

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