Latest Developments, April 30

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Land grab data
The Guardian reports on a new database of international land deals that indicates the rate at which investors are gobbling up Africa’s agricultural land.
“Researchers say 754 deals have been identified on the continent, covering 56.2m hectares – or roughly the size of Kenya.
Little evidence of job creation or other benefits to local communities could be found among the hundreds of largely export-oriented projects, said the report. In some cases, it adds, investors have secured hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime farmland at little to no cost. One deal in South Sudan, for example, has reportedly granted a Norwegian investor a 99-year lease for 179,000 hectares at an annual cost of just $0.07 a hectare.
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But, so far, few large-scale projects have been established on the millions of hectares bought or leased for agricultural activities, according to the report, which says less than 30% of documented deals are thought to be in production. It suggests that some investors may have underestimated the challenges associated with their projects, while other deals are likely to be purely strategic and speculative investments.”

Suicidal tendencies
Reuters reports that workers at a Chinese factory owned by Apple supplier Foxconn have once again threatened mass suicide just weeks after the two companies came up with a “landmark agreement” to improve working conditions.
“The deal was agreed almost two years after a series of worker suicides at Foxconn plants focused attention on conditions at Chinese factories and sparked criticism Apple’s products were built on the backs of mistreated Chinese workers.
On Tuesday, Apple reported that its fiscal second-quarter net income almost doubled after a jump in iPhone sales, blowing past financial market expectations.”

Shell games
Amnesty International has slammed oil giant Shell for its response to allegations it has caused serious environmental damage in Nigeria’s Niger Delta.
“Shell says more than 70% of spills in the Niger Delta over the last five years were caused by sabotage or leaks caused by thieves. But such claims by Shell on the proportion of oil spilled as a result of illegal activity are not credible. Based on new evidence, more than half the oil spilled in the Niger Delta during 2008 – and possibly as much as 80 per cent – was due to operational failure, not sabotage.”

Defining crisis
The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders writes that “people with decent but ordinary employment” in places like London, Nairobi, Toronto and Mumbai can no longer afford housing.
“ ‘Every time house prices fall, the national newspapers say there is a housing crisis,’ says Alan Gilbert, a housing-policy specialist at the University College of London. ‘I would argue otherwise – the housing situation is better when house prices are stable or falling – because that means that demand is being outstripped by supply.’
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If we really wanted housing to be profitable and plentiful, we’d tax owners on the annual rise in value of their property – a Land Value Tax.”

Who’s afraid of UNCTAD?
Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Jayati Ghosh analyzes last week’s contentious UN Conference on Trade and Development in Doha, which suggested the north-south divide is alive and well.
“The governments of the United States and other developed countries are keen to export what they see as democracy to different parts of the world, and to point out (with respect to countries that try to control information and freedom of speech) that it is impossible to control the spread of ideas. Clearly, they need to learn the same messages themselves, especially with respect to ideas and economic analysis.”

Power shift
OpenOil’s Johnny West calls on resource-rich countries to stand up to extractive industry multinationals.
“The IMF makes two surprising observations in its consultation document, albeit in carefully coded language. The first is that oil and mining companies might be ‘under-taxe’ relative to their profits and internal rates of return. The second is that ‘in some cases, governments might benefit from separating exploration from extraction – for example, by auctioning known deposits to the highest bidder’.
Behind these mundane words lies scope for a considerable shift in thinking.”

Post-neoclassical thinking
The Fung Global Institute’s Andrew Sheng argues that “sacrifice in the interest of unity” is the only path to a sustainable global economy.
“Meanwhile, existing political systems promise good jobs, sound governance, a sustainable environment, and social harmony without sacrifice – a paradise of self-interested free riders that can be sustained only by sacrificing the natural environment and the welfare of future generations.
We cannot postpone the pain of adjustment forever by printing money. Sustainability can be achieved only when the haves become willing to sacrifice for the have-nots.”

Economist accountability
Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik suggests his colleagues should take responsibility for the real-world damage their ideas can cause.
“In the aftermath of the financial crisis, it became fashionable for economists to decry the power of big banks. It is because politicians are in the pockets of financial interests, they said, that the regulatory environment allowed those interests to reap huge rewards at great social expense. But this argument conveniently overlooks the legitimizing role played by economists themselves. It was economists and their ideas that made it respectable for policymakers and regulators to believe that what is good for Wall Street is good for Main Street.
Economists love theories that place organized special interests at the root of all political evil. In the real world, they cannot wriggle so easily out of responsibility for the bad ideas that they have so often spawned. With influence must come accountability.”

Latest Developments, April 26

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International justice
Following the guilty verdict delivered against former Liberian President Charles Taylor by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Oxford University’s Christine Cheng discusses some of the problems with international justice as currently practiced.
“Courts build their legitimacy partly based on the cases that they choose to hear. By focusing predominantly on Africans, there is a real worry that the ICC will be perceived by non-Western countries as providing a cloak of legitimacy for the US and other Western nations to achieve their political aims— despite the fact that the ICC’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo has explicitly stated that the ICC is not a court ‘just for the Third World.’
What the international community needs to guard against is allowing the ICC to become a tool that Western liberal democracies can impose on developing country leaders who have fallen out of political favour. For the ICC to remain viable, neither can it be perceived as the backdoor by which Western powers target their political enemies.”

Quake aid
The Center for Global Development’s Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz look into where US funds intended for quake relief in Haiti ended up going.
“The U.S. Department of Defense, which took responsibility for security in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, was the largest recipient. The remainder of the funds went to large international NGOs, private contractors, and other agencies of the U.S. government such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Health and Human Services (HHS). As we have blogged previously, less than one percent went to the Government of Haiti to rebuild public institutions. And Haitian-led NGOs have barely received any money at all.
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Contracts to Haitian firms remain few and far between. Following a request from Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch, USAID released data on its procurement from local contractors in Haiti. Local contracts add up to $9.45 million, which is only 0.02 percent of total contracts awarded by USAID. Over 75 percent of USAID funds went to private contractors inside the Beltway (located in Washington DC, Maryland, or Virginia).”

Bioeconomy
Inter Press Service reports that critics of the new US National Bioeconomy Blueprint say it emphasizes economic interests at the expense of social and environmental ones.
“ ‘The bio-economy approach offers politicians in industrialized countries an opportunity to be seen to be doing something about meeting ill-defined “renewable energy targets”, while maximizing opportunities for economic growth and securing a constant supply of energy,’ [the Global Forest Coalition’s “Bio-economy Versus Biodiversity” report] warns. “There is precious little concern about the environment, or about impacts in other countries, apart from the usual platitudes about providing jobs.’ ”

Maid in India
A new Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations/India Committee of the Netherlands report details rights abuses at Indian textile plants that supply Western clothing companies.
“For real change, scale is needed. Corporate and other initiatives, certification bodies and business associations should push their members to commit to real action, or discipline them. The voluntary character of compliance activities should urgently become more binding. Freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are key rights that enable workers to defend their rights. Both manufacturers and buyers should actively ensure these rights are respected.”

Laws of war
Lawyer Chase Madar argues a Wikileaks-obtained video showing US helicopters killing a number of unarmed Iraqis – an act that may well have been legal – is “an indictment of the laws of war as we know them.”
“Let’s be clear: What killed the civilians walking the streets of Baghdad that day in 2007 was not ‘war crimes’ but war. And that holds for so many thousands of other Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed by drone strikes, air strikes, night raids, convoys, and nervous checkpoint guards as well.
Who, after all, writes the laws of war? Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to ‘regulatory capture’ by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more. Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out ‘legal’ ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?”

Good aid, bad aid
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie asks if some donors are better than others.
“The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, certainly seems to think so, urging poor countries at an aid conference in Busan, South Korea, to ‘be wary of donors who are more interested in extracting your resources than in building your capacity’. It is hard to imagine a more absurd statement from a US official, given the country’s leading role in previous scrambles for Africa – not to mention its weak record (with other donors) of ‘building capacity’ over more than 50 years of aid-giving. From the cold war to aid conditionality supporting its own interests, to the pouring of money into the Horn of Africa after the 9/11 attacks, the US pretty much wrote the book on how to use aid to ensure strategic interests. Clinton should remember John Kennedy’s assertion in 1962: ‘Aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world … I put it right at the top of the essential programmes in protecting the security of the free world.’ ”

Population bomb
In an interview with the Guardian, Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich argues that both the numbers and behaviour of people pose a threat to the future of humanity.
“[Human population and consumption] multiply together. You have to be deal with them together. We have too much consumption among the rich and too little among the poor. That implies that terrible thing that we are going to have to do which is to somehow redistribute access to resources away the rich to the poor. But in the US we have been doing the opposite. The Republican party is wildly in favour of more redistribution, of taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.”

Latest Developments, April 25

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Setting a precedent
The Uxbridge Gazette reports on an asbestos-related UK court ruling that the plaintiff’s lawyers say represents a landmark in the fight for corporate accountability.
“Historically, parent companies have been able to avoid any liabilities arising from work undertaken at its subsidiaries, treating them as separate entities where one company cannot be found responsible for the actions of another. Todays (Wednesday) decision will mean that parent companies can be held liable for the practices of their subsidiaries irrespective of the corporate veil, according to Mr Chandler’s legal team.
The judgment, it believes, will not only have far reaching ramifications for companies in this country with subsidiaries in the UK but also multinational companies headquartered in the UK with subsidiaries in developing countries.”

Chief’s letter
The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network reports that Canada’s top First Nations chief, Shawn Atleo, has written a letter to the federal government slamming its lack of consultation over proposed changes to environmental assessments of industrial projects as “unlawful and unconstitutional.”
“At stake but not mentioned in Atleo’s letter is Enbridge’s massive Northern Gateway Pipeline project which is broadly opposed by First Nations. The project, however, is backed by the Conservative government which says piping Alberta bitumen to the British Columbia coast to satiate China’s oil-thirsty economic machinery is in Canada’s national interest.
‘Thirty years after the Constitution recognized and affirmed Aboriginal and Treaty rights, it is an alarming development that Canada would take such steps that will potentially further undermine processes that already do not adequately address clear duties for consultation and accommodation,’ wrote Atleo, in the letter, dated the April 20, 2012.”

Dam tensions
Inter Press Service reports on the labour troubles plaguing hydroelectric dam construction in Brazil.
“A year ago, [trade unionist Altair Donizete de Oliveira] had predicted that unrest would break out again at Jirau because the dam is being built by a consortium controlled by a foreign company, the French utility GDF Suez.
Analysing the factors fuelling the conflicts, Oliveira said ‘Brazilian companies have a heart,’ while foreign firms only use cold logic based on technical considerations. He also mentioned cultural differences.”

Writing about Africa
Morehouse College’s Laura Seay writes that the simple solution to poor Western media coverage of Africa is to follow the BBC model of hiring African journalists.
“There’s no reason that other major media providers couldn’t hire local reporters to improve their coverage as well. Rather than relegating them to second-tier or co-author status, why not hire Africans as country or regional correspondents? A reporter does not have to be Caucasian to provide objective and well-written reporting from the continent, and in many cases, this reporting is more nuanced than that of an international correspondent who spends five days reporting a story. For example, by far the most thoughtful reporting and analysis on Ugandan reactions to the Kony 2012 viral video came not from American journalists, but from Ugandan reporter Angelo Izama who, to the New York Times‘ credit, was able to publish an opinion article in its pages. Why can’t the Times hire Izama or someone equally qualified to report on Uganda full time?”

Post-2015 problem
Anti-poverty activist Lysa John and Oxfam’s Stephen Hale argue the discussion around establishing successors to the Millennium Development Goals is distressingly one-sided.
“Where are the voices of the poor in this process? The conversation at present is overwhelmingly between northern governments and thinktanks. The most glowing achievements in the MDG success story have been the result of social and economic initiatives in the global south. Most believe that traditional donor countries have failed to meet the commitment for aid and partnership spelled out in the infamously catch-all goal eight – to develop a global partnership for development.
This really matters. Unless there is far broader involvement and ownership of the next round of goals, there will be no agreement on them. Developing countries and the ‘emerging’ economies must be co-creators of this process. The UN plans to consult civil society in 50 countries. But civil society groups and coalitions in the south need financial support to help them carry out their own independent reflection and mobilisation on this, not simply an invitation to participate in the UN consultation.”

Many centres
In a Q&A with IRIN, Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom discusses the concept of polycentrism as it relates to managing the planet and its resources.
“Part of my discouragement with the international negotiations is that we have gotten riveted into battles at the very big level over who caused global change in the first place and who is responsible for correcting [it]. It will take a long time to resolve some of these conflicts. Meanwhile, if we do not take action, the increase to greenhouse gas collection at a global level gets larger and larger. While we cannot solve all aspects of this problem by cumulatively taking action at local levels, we can make a difference, and we should.
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We need to get out of thinking that we have to be moving the same everywhere. We need to be recognizing the complexity of the different problems being faced in a wide diversity of regions of the world. Thus, really great solutions that work in one environment do not work in others. We need to understand why, and figure out ways of helping to learn from good examples as well as bad examples of how to move ahead.”

Aiming high on the ATT
Oxfam’s Ed Cairns presents a new paper that argues national governments must not compromise in the quest for a tough Arms Trade Treaty at this summer’s UN negotiations.
“But there’s no point in any new regulation unless it works – to make the market operate for the public good. And that applies every bit as much to a UN conference to agree a useful Arms Trade Treaty. The vast majority of governments want an effective Treaty that will have a practical impact on curbing the irresponsible arms deals that fuel human rights abuses or war crimes – or waste a vast amount of money that could be better spent on, say, development. But like every idea for effective regulation, there are those who want to water it down.  On the arms trade, they’re governments like Syria and Iran, and – an odd companion – the US, which may have made a catastrophic error when it insisted that the process to agree the Treaty should be by consensus.”

Latest Developments, April 24

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Looking beyond aid
The Guardian reports that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has urged the EU to do more to ensure its trade, immigration and food policies do not harm poor countries.
“Between 2009 and 2011, only seven out of 164 impact assessments looked at the impact on developing countries even though 77 were potentially relevant to them, the [OECD’s development assistance committee] said. In the case of fisheries policy, the impact assessment restricted its analysis to public agreements, excluding the majority of EU vessels that fish outside EU waters under private agreements or joint venture, the review noted.”

Commodity pains
The UN News Centre reports on new findings that suggest high commodity prices are doing more harm than good to poor countries, despite higher export revenues.
“What should be a boon for poor nations, especially the globe’s 48 least developed countries – whose economies often depend heavily on commodity exports – is on balance a negative development because many of these countries are net importers of oil and staple foods.
Since the food crisis of 2008, prices for basic nourishment have been both volatile and high, the report notes – and poor families are acutely vulnerable, as they typically spend 50 per cent or more of their incomes on food.”

Five-star apology
Postmedia News reports that Canada’s international development minister has apologized for upgrading from “a five-star hotel to a swankier hotel” at the taxpayers’ expense while attending a conference in London last year.
“The government announced Monday [International Development Minister Bev Oda] was reimbursing some of the additional costs from the June 2011 international conference — held to discuss vaccines and immunization for children in developing countries — after they were uncovered in a media report.
Those reimbursed costs included the $16 glass of orange juice.
In her apology, Oda made no mention of repaying the money she spent hiring a chauffeured limousine during her trip — costs that may not have been incurred had she stayed in the hotel where the conference was held.”

Museum greenwash
The CBC reports that environmental groups are protesting the decision to name a room at the Canadian Museum of Nature after mining giant Barrick Gold.
“Barrick Gold Corp., based out of Toronto, purchased the room’s naming rights for about $1 million. The new ‘Barrick Salon’ is the museum’s premier rental space featuring a circular room with glass windows from floor to ceiling.
The decision has activists planning a demonstration at the museum this afternoon, a few hours before the official naming reception that includes Barrick Gold executives.
They believe mining companies do not put nature before their own business practice.”

Vale under fire
Inter Press Service reports that 30 groups from around the world have come together to condemn Brazilian mining giant Vale for allegedly committing serious environmental and human rights abuses while posting earnings in excess of $20 billion in each of the last two years.
“Vale is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, the International Council on Mining and Metals ICMM), and the São Paulo Stock Exchange Corporate Sustainability Index (ISE), all of which establish corporate social and environmental responsibility principles.
But in January 2012 it was named the “Worst Company in the World” by the Public Eye Awards, which every year name and shame the companies that have shown the worst social or environmental irresponsibility.
Vale even beat out Japan’s Tepco, the firm that operates the nuclear reactors in Fukushima, which melted down after the March 2011 tsunami.”

Duty to cooperate
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, argues that the current debate on climate change lacks “an honest starting point,” which he believes should be human rights.
“Climate change represents an enormous threat to a whole host of human rights: the right to food, the right to water and sanitation, the right to development. There is therefore huge scope for human rights courts and non-judicial human rights bodies to treat climate change as the immediate threat to human rights that it is. Such bodies could therefore take government policy to task when it is too short-sighted, too unambitious, or too narrowly focused on its own constituents at the expense of those elsewhere. Fossil fuel mining, deforestation, the disturbance of carbon sinks, and the degradation of the oceans are developments that can be blocked on human rights grounds.”

Africa’s image
Author Binyavanga Wainaina takes issue with international media portrayals of Africa.
“The truth is, with the rise of China, we do not have to take any deal Europe throws at us that comes packaged with permanent poverty, incompetent volunteers and the occasional Nato bomb.
As the West flounders, there is a real sense that we have some leverage.
The truth is, we will never look like what CNN wants us to look like.
But that’s fine – we can get online now and completely bypass their nonsense.”

Privatizing Rivera
Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi reflects on the irony of having to pay $25 to see the revolutionary public art of Diego Rivera inside New York’s private Museum of Modern Art.
“The spirit of Diego Rivera has long since abandoned MoMA and is now hovering somewhere between Zuccotti Park in New York and Tahrir Square in Cairo – hovering over the Syntagma Square in Athens, Azadi Square in Tehran, the Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid, and the remnants of the Pearl Square in Bahrain – where young artists are plotting the proportions of their organic tenacity between the beautiful and the just. ”

Global economic governance
The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Deborah James argues the UN Conference on Trade and Development is “seriously threatening” to those who caused the global financial crisis.
“The role of UNCTAD as an alternative voice to the ‘Washington Consensus’ paradigm – being the only multilateral economic institution focused on development – must be strengthened vis-a-vis the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and the G20 in global economic governance decision-making. In the coming week, it will be important to choose sides in the ‘Battle of UNCTAD’s Future Mandate.’ A lot depends on it.”

Latest Developments, April 23

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Big spill
Amnesty International says it has obtained evidence that a 2008 oil spill in Nigeria’s Niger Delta was “far worse” than originally reported by Shell.
“The previously unpublished assessment, carried out by US firm Accufacts Inc. found that between 1,440 and 4,320 barrels of oil were flooding the Bodo area each day following the leak. The Nigerian regulators have confirmed that the spill lasted for 72 days.
Shell’s official investigation report claims only 1,640 barrels of oil were spilt in total. But based on the independent assessment the total amount of oil spilt over the 72 day period is between 103,000 barrels and 311,000 barrels.”

Spying changes
The Washington Post reports on Pentagon plans to “ramp up its spying operations” beyond war zones with the creation of the Defense Clandestine Service.
“The plan, the [senior defense] official said, was developed in response to a classified study completed last year by the director of national intelligence that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to be more focused on major targets beyond the tactical considerations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The new service will seek to ‘make sure officers are in the right locations to pursue those requirements,’ said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the ‘realignment’ of the military’s classified human espionage efforts.
The official declined to provide details on where such shifts might occur, but the nation’s most pressing intelligence priorities in recent years have included counter­terrorism, nonproliferation and ascendant powers such as China.”

Mexican migration
The Pew Hispanic Center reports that net migration from Mexico to the US has fallen to “zero,” while deportations are at an all-time high.
“The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.
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In the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the United States to Mexico.
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As apprehensions at the border have declined, deportations of unauthorized Mexican immigrants—some of them picked up at work or after being arrested for other criminal violations—have risen to record levels. In 2010, nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants—73% of them Mexicans—were deported by U.S. authorities.”

Endangered people
The Observer reports that the “genocide” of Brazil’s Awá people has its origins in development assistance from Europe and the World Bank.
“Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. The EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of 13.6m tons a year for 15 years. The railway cut directly through the Awá’s land and with the railway came settlers. A road-building programme quickly followed, opening up the Awá’s jungle home to loggers, who moved in from the east.
It was, according to Survival’s research director, Fiona Watson, a recipe for disaster. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no natural immunity.”

World Bank land grabs
Friends of the Earth has released a new report just ahead of a World Bank conference on land and poverty, in which the NGO documents a series of abuses it traces back to “a land grab initially funded” by the financial institution.
“The World Bank had historically provided millions of dollars in funding and technical support to palm oil expansion in forested islands off the coast of Lake Victoria in Kalangala, Uganda. Nearly 10,000 hectares have already been planted covering almost a quarter of the land area of the islands. While the Bank has since disassociated itself from the project, the land grabs continue.
Palm oil plantations have come at the expense of local food crops and rainforests. Local people have been prevented from accessing water sources and grazing land. Despite promises of employment, locals have lost their means of livelihood and are struggling to make ends meet.”


Red-pen wars
Trinity College’s Vijay Prashad writes about the battle between rich countries and G-77 nations over the text of a UN Conference on Trade and Development draft document.
“At UNCTAD, the JUSSCANNZ Group (abbreviated as JZ) is the most engaged grouping. Switzerland’s ambassador to the UNCTAD seems to have taken on the role of group leader.
The most common comment on the leaked text is the following phrase ‘JZ delete’. The red pen of the JZ delegation flashed across the ‘consensus’ document, mainly fighting back against the G-77’s attempt to bring matters of finance, commodity prices and hunger onto the agenda.
One of the special sentences deleted by the JZ group is this, ‘Securing access to food – one of the most basic human needs – is a priority (JZ delete).’ Another that the European Union deleted after the G-77 + China added it in was that people have the right to ‘medicine at affordable prices (G-77) {EU delete}’. ”

British empire crimes
The Guardian’s George Monbiot takes on Britain’s “national ability to airbrush and disregard” atrocities committed in its former colonies.
“The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.”

Extraterritoriality
The American Lawyer’s Michael Goldhaber argues that a case currently before the US Supreme Court has the potential to do more damage to the cause of international human rights than simply establishing that the Alien Tort Statute does not apply to corporations.
“A broad ruling against extraterritoriality is more dangerous to human rights plaintiffs than a broad ruling against corporate liability for two reasons. It could bar alien tort suits against corporate officers and directors, and it could bar more traditional alien tort suits against individuals who commit torture or other war crimes.”