Law, tribunals, the regime of corporate protection set by European treaties, the belief you can defend companies against governments thanks to economic law : one false premise of the neoliberal dream, the pseudo-regime of economic liberty built without Austrian economics that has developed since the end of the 1990s.

Sometimes, the intervention of governments is related to actual purposes of common sense – this can happen! But maybe due to e.g. military secrecy these purposes cannot be stated openly, because this would disclose elements that have to stay secret for reasons of national defense. Yet consequences may end up in front of tribunals, causing quidproquos. Another issue is when the government intervenes out of good purposes but without full knowledge of the company’s intentions and actual work taking already into account the issues driving that governmental intervention, causing strong hindrances.

Investor-State dispute settlement is an extreme case : sometimes it works, when it’s about small countries, but it smells more of neocolonialism than of anything else (even though my knowledge of the truth on alpha-emitting nanoparticulates & human health allows me to discard as trash many, many cases raised by States in the field of environmental protection & human health).

In general : when governments want to achieve something, against the interest of private companies, they WILL achieve it, because of the vast array of tools that they have at their disposal, and many of these tools will remain invisible. Governments have many ways to control the economic playing field, with media control, leverage on private banks, calls for tenders… example of turmoil that legal teams cannot fix. State subsidies to companies is just a brick in a much bigger wall.

Another issue relates to trade unions, the Communists inside private companies for instance who can as well use certain tools of sabotage. This comes hand-in-hand with the issue of the intervention of foreign governments (China for instance).

It all comes back, at some point, to the question of moral sense, whether your act is guided by just purposes or not, that’s what matters. A lawyer with a just purpose trying to defend a private company in advanced fields of technology is likely to be faced with an equation with too much unknowns (perfect knowledge of technologies involved, defense issues, subterraneous issues of rivalry between governments, for instance are likely to be almost impossible to foresee even though this blog and my website http://www.depleteduranium.org are attempts at leveling the playing field without disclosing technologies that have a strong economic value but no direct relation to human health) to be able to achieve moral results.