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" (Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post) As it happens, I have a family interest in Costa Rica now, so I tend to notice news stories that I might otherwise have ignored a few years back. It turns out that there&amp;#039;s gold in them thar hills and a Canadian company wants it, and Costa Rica would rather not live with the economic devastation that comes with digging this gold out. So the company does what the real powers in the political universe do when confronted with the inconvenience of national sovereignty. It took Costa Rica to court. In a press release, the company said it had &amp;quot;served notice&amp;quot; to Costa Rica in April 2013, and after the country did not respond, its subsidiary announced a massive lawsuit is &amp;quot;imminent,&amp;quot; the largest in Costa Rica&amp;#039;s history. The company believes the country is violating its trade agreements with Canada. Yokebec Soto, spokesperson for Infinito Gold&amp;#039;s subsidiary in Costa Rica, told Global News by email the company has already invested $92 million in the project and if the project does not proceed, could lose $1 billion in profits. A $1 billion lawsuit. And the joker in the deck? But international arbitration expert Gus Van Harten says Infinito Gold may have a case. He says through international trade agreements signed between countries, international arbitrators have the power to override court and government decisions of sovereign countries. &amp;quot;So on the one hand, in a way, it&amp;#039;s the Costa Rican government&amp;#039;s fault,&amp;quot; says the associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He also says the international arbitration system is tainted, and that arbitrators, who are given immense power to settle disputes, aren&amp;#039;t proper judges. Some can actually double as lawyers at the same time they are arbitrators, even if they are arguing similar cases. Van Harten says this is a &amp;quot;well-known conflict of interest.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The point is the people making the decision are the wrong people,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;And whatever decision they make, it will lack integrity as a result.&amp;quot; (As it happens, Canadian companies are running amok all over the hemisphere. They are running amok in Colombia. They are running amok in this country, with our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline. Hey, Canada. Can we talk?)  When people talk about free trade -- and, god knows, we ought to be talking about it more than we are -- this is the system they&amp;#039;re talking about -- giving multinational corporations the freedom to grind up local populations, ignore local laws, poison local water supplies, and render the national governments who are supposed to represent the local populations impotent in the face of their depredations. What happens then? The local populations lose faith in their governments, which then in turn become weaker and less able to protect the local populations, and the very idea of a nation in the public mind comes crashing down. Which, of course, is the whole point. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19874/canadian-company-sues-costa-rica-gold-112013/>