BBB will have made a huge contribution if it develops data, tools, and jobs for people to collect and deploy both on the resilience agenda. Give the next generation of social science PhDs something to write about!
Luckily, one of the teams that can have the most impact on this field building is at OIRA, and includes the author of this book @ksabeelrahman... amazon.com/Democracy-Agai…
Investment law Twitter (yes, such a thing exists) has lit up over a recent video from the annual conference in January from the European Federation for Investment Law and Arbitration (EFILA). Thread…
Due to the pandemic, this conference, like many, went virtual this year. You can find the presentations here. The keynote speech was delivered by Gary Born, a prominent arbitrator in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). efila.org/annual-confere…
As @goodhouses describes here, ISDS is a parallel legal system where multinational corporations can challenge host state governments over regulatory treatment, outside of national court systems. themonkeycage.org/2015/11/invest…
On a human level, it was great to catch up with @paologerbaudo's work. I randomly met him when he was an undergrad in Cuneo almost 20 years, when I was a grad student. He and Irene Peano showed us DC punx a great time in their hometown.
As it happens, this was just months after I first met @DanielDenvir, then a teenager. We were all involved in the global justice movement, which Paolo wanted to hear all about.
- Articulate on the campaign a generally applicable principle (government should support unionization)
- Articulate why the principle is valuable (unions help reduce inequality, which in turn makes politics hellish)
- Once you're in office, the principle is an umbrella that empowers third parties to apply the principle to specific instances/ companies
- Follow up and verify. Allow others to do the same.c
Joe Biden wants to replace the US federal vehicle fleet with electric vehicles Made in America. How will we know if an EV counts as "American" under our procurement laws? A thread... pcmag.com/news/president…
It turns out that this is far from a straightforward question, as two statutes called the Buy American Act of 1933 (BAA) and Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (TAA) interact in complicated ways...
Depending on the country of origin of the components of the vehicle, how much the vehicle costs, and which country the final assembly is in, the answer of whether an EV gets the Buy American treatment can change. Here's a flow-chart showing just how complicated this is.
With this new Executive Order on Buy American, the Biden-Harris Administration will fulfil a core campaign promise. A few thoughts… whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
To take the first order question first: why would the US want to give preference to domestic production? There are both normative and policy reasons.
On the normative front, it signals that there is something special about the money that we collectively put into the common coffer. That collective fund goes back to the collective.
This is a strong first step on using the Defense Production Act to ensure adequate supply of the Public Health Supply Chain. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
It urges ALL relevant agencies to use ALL tools - including DPA - to ensure that domestic industry sources can provide needed supplies.
Tools include "acquiring additional stockpiles, improving distribution systems, *building market capacity, or expanding the industrial base*."
This goes far beyond the Trump administration's limited use of the DPA, as documented in this two-month-long megathread.