Today’s links End of the line for corporate sovereignty: ISDSes are on the ropes, and not a moment too soon. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. End of the line for corporate sovereignty (permalink) Back in the 1950s, a new, democratically elected Iranian government nationalized foreign oil interests. The UK and the US then backed a coup, deposing the progressive government with one more hospitable to foreign corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization_of_the_Iranian_oil_industry This nasty piece of geopolitical skullduggery led to the mother-of-all-blowbacks: the Anglo-American puppet regime was toppled by the Ayatollah and his cronies, who have led Iran ever since. For the US and the UK, the lesson was clear: they needed a less kinetic way to ensure that sovereign countries around the world steered clear of policies that undermined the profits of their oil companies and other commercial giants. Thus, the “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) was born. The modern ISDS was perfected in the 1990s with the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). The ECT was meant to foam the runway for western corporations seeking to take over ex-Soviet energy facilities, by making those new post-Glasnost governments promise to never pass laws that would undermine foreign companies’ profits. But as Nick Dearden writes for Jacobin, the western companies that pushed the east into the ECT failed to…Pluralistic: End of the line for corporate sovereignty (27 Mar 2024)