The application of U.S. law to American citizens visiting foreign countries is something of a difficult question that is simpler to consider with hyperbole; murder being illegal in the United States, should an American citizen visiting a nation where murder is legal be free to murder the natives (locals) if it's o.k. with them? In other words, are laws within one jurisdiction in the absence of a legal treaty or agreement creating comity in law between nations binding upon an American citizen travelling externally; does his own nation's legal code bind him to the nation's conduct wherever he goes or just within his own jurisdiction? Such questions can be settled only by the promulgators of laws within a nation. If they have decided to make U.S. legal standards applicable upon an American wherever he goes, then plainly the standard should apply as well to trans-national corporations conducting business in the United States and beyond. The U.S.A. hasn't such a universal legal criteria for it's jurisdiction over U.S. citizens presently, and corporations are regarded as individuals in the law-a serious error or loophole for-itself providing vast advantage to corporations in avoidaning fair taxation and for predatiory extraction of non-renewable resources globally.

Trans-national corporations have several advantages in laws and trade, being able to slip between the cracks and defeat the purpose of laws that also happen to affect people doing business just in their own nation solidly. Trans-national corporations in effect are stateless individuals with multiple false passports avoiding taxation and producing products where externalities of pollution and ecological destruction or reduction of habitat are not effectively defended against by the locals. The Amazon basin is one such exploited world critical ecosystem targeted for decades in ecological extraction-for-profit schemes.

"More than 70% of the Amazon region has been marked for oil and gas development"- quote from...

http://www.villageearth.org/pa ges/Projects/Peru/perublog/200 8/02/indigenous-movements-prot est-of-oil.html

If the United States Congress regarded world resource conservation as of critical importance it could swiftly act to promulgate laws to regulate U.S. headquartered trans-national corporate ecological practices abroad. However U.S. politicians are far more concerned with covering their political derrieres from being voted out of office than in promoting good legislation. The power of the global corporate broadcast media and the fossil fuel oil industry axis of anti-democratic elite interests for concentrated wealth, reign in democratic and ecological economic pragmatism from becoming written into significant laws. Nothing will be done to hold those trans-national corporate pirates to a higher ecological standard, if such can be said to exist in the United States in the aftermath of the Bush II administration. Fossil fuel economic structurally derived federal deficits are a fact of economic life wasting trillions in opportunity costs. Trans-national depletion of non-renewable resources and over-use of stock-fund resources are a virtue for the non-renewable industrial economic sector rolling like a juggernaut over remaining rare Earth ecological health.

http://www.nature.org/wherewew ork/southamerica/peru/features /art17206.html

Learn more about this author, Gary C. Gibson.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Should US environmental standards apply when multinational companies develop the petroleum resources of fragile ecosystems such as Peru's Amazon??
We want to hear your view. Write now!