![]() In the end, Bechtel was forced to drop its case for a token settlement of less than $1, but that took years of protests and international organizing (in which my organization was involved) to achieve, and cost the Bolivian treasury millions of dollars in legal fees. 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. #The audacity gif free#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. #The audacity gif download#Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.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. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.įor printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. #The audacity gif pdf#Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.įor PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |