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Yossi Cohen was appointed head of the Mossad a year ago, after a government vetting committee accepted that he had no personal ties to Netanyahu. But Cohen forgot to mention that he is extremely close to Netanyahu’s high-flying friends – connections that are now under investigation. Milchan set up a global security firm in 2008 called Blue Sky International, stuffed with Israeli security veterans. Packer soon became a partner. They developed close ties to Cohen, first while he was a senior official at the Mossad and later when he headed Israel’s national security council. Before Cohen was appointed head of Mossad in December 2015, the pair had hoped to recruit him to their cyber-security operations. Cohen received several gifts from Packer, in violation of Israeli government rules, including a stay at one of his luxury hotels. A source speaking to Haaretz said Blue Sky had “more than [a] direct line” to Netanyahu. They “would pull him out from anywhere, at any time, on any occasion.” According to Haaretz’s military analyst, Amir Oren, the new disclosures raise serious questions about whether Milchan and Packer twisted Netanyahu’s arm to parachute Cohen into the post over the favored candidate. In return, Packer may have been hoping that Cohen would authorise exceptional Israeli residency for him, classifying him as a security asset.

From Hollywood to Mossad Cases 1000 and 2000 share at least one figure in common. Milchan gave Netanyahu extravagant gifts over many years, but he is also reported to have acted as go-between, bringing arch-enemies Netanyahu and Mozes together. Milchan has his own financial stake in the media, in his case a holding in the Channel 10 TV station. In addition, Milchan introduced Netanyahu to sympathetic businessmen, including his friend Packer, to discuss taking the ailing Yedioth media group off Mozes’ hands. Only last October he arranged for media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, to fly to Israel for one night for a secret meeting with Netanyahu. Milchan is undoubtedly at the centre of the shadowy world of power and finance that corrupts public life in Israel. Not only is Milchan a highly influential Hollywood figure, having produced more than 100 films, but he has admitted that he is a former Mossad agent. He used his Hollywood connections to help make arms deals and secure parts for Israel’s nuclear weapons program. One can only wonder whether Milchan was not effectively set up in his Hollywood career as a cover for his Mossad activities. But Milchan, it seems, is still wielding influence in Israel’s twilight world of security.

eyond this, one one can only speculate about how Cohen’s indebtedness to Milchan, Packer and Netanyahu might have influenced his decisions as head of the Mossad. It was only a few years ago that the former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, was reported to have wrestled furiously with Netanyahu to stop him launching a military strike on Iran. Prosecution drags feet It is unclear for the time being whether the revelations are drawing to a close or will lead deeper into Israel’s twin netherworlds of financial corruption and security. But what has emerged so far should be enough to finish off Netanyahu as prime minister. Whether it does so may depend on the extent of Israel’s compromised legal system. Attorney general Avichai Mendelblit was appointed by Netanyahu and is a political ally. He appears to have been dragging his feet as much as possible to slow down the police investigation, if not sabotage it. But the weight of evidence is looking like it may prove too overwhelming. As political analyst Yossi Verter observed: “There’s no way that a police commissioner … appointed [by Netanyahu] and a cautious attorney general, who in the past was part of his close circle and one of his loyalists, would be putting him through the seven circles of hell if they weren’t convinced that there’s a solid basis for indictment and conviction.” The next question for Netanyahu is whether he will step down if indicted. He should, if Olmert’s example is followed. But his officials are citing a 1993 high court ruling that allows a cabinet minister under indictment to remain in office. Certainly if Netanyahu chooses to stay on, his decision would be appealed to the court again. However, the judges may be reluctant to oust a sitting prime minister. The court of public opinion is likely to be decisive in that regard. A recent poll shows few Israelis believe Netanyahu is innocent of the allegations. Some 54 per cent think he broke the law, while only 28 believe him. Opinion, however, is split evenly on whether he should resign.

If past experience is any measure, Netanyahu will try to turn public opinion his way by increasing friction with the Palestinians and exploiting the international arena, especially his relations with the Trump administration. He may be expected to encourage Trump at the very least to posture more stridently against Iran. Nonetheless, most observers assume Netanyahu is doomed – it is simply a matter of when. The odds are on an indictment in late spring, followed by elections in the fall, say Israeli analysts. At this stage, none of his political rivals wants to be seen stabbing Netanyahu in the back. Most are keeping quiet. But behind the scenes, political leaders are hurrying to forge new alliances and extract political concessions while Netanyahu is wounded.

Who might succeed Netanyahu? Yair Lapid, of the centre-right Yesh Atid, is heading the polls, but that may in part reflect the disarray in Netanyahu’s Likud party. In a sign of where the deeper currents in Israeli society are leading, a Maariv poll last week showed that settler leader Naftali Bennett would win an election if he were to head the Likud. Netanyahu now needs the help of all the powerful friends he can muster. His biggest ally, U.S. casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, may not be among them. After the revelations that Netanyahu was conspiring against him with Mozes, Adelson has cut back on Israel Hayom’s circulation and is reported to be offering less favorable coverage of the Netanyahus. That could prove the final straw, sealing Netanyahu’s fate.

With the UK duly pacified, and the US in full support of Israel, moving forward with annexing Palestinian land became an obvious choice for Israeli politicians. Bezalel Smotrich, a Knesset member of the extremist Jewish Home party, put it best. "We thank the American people for voting Trump into office, which was what gave us the opportunity for the bill to pass," he said shortly after the vote.

The so-called "Regulation Bill" will retroactively validate 4,000 illegal structures built on private Palestinian land. In the occupied Palestinian territories, all Jewish settlements are considered illegal under international law, as further indicated in UNSC Resolution 2334. There are also 97 illegal Jewish settlement outposts - a modest estimation - that are now set to be legalised and, naturally, expanded at the expense of Palestine. The price of these settlements has been paid mostly by US taxpayers' money, but also the blood and tears of Palestinians, generation after generation. It is important, though, that we realise that Israel's latest push to legalise illegal outposts and annex large swaths of the West Bank is the norm, not the exception.

But what is the Palestinian leadership doing about it? "I can't deny that the (bill) helps us to better explain our position. We couldn't have asked for anything more," a Palestinian Authority official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, as quoted by Shlomi Elder. WATCH: 'The settlers and the guards harass us and our children' (2:35) Elder writes: "The bill, whether it goes through or is blocked by the Supreme Court, already proves that Israel is not interested in a diplomatic resolution of the conflict."

The greatest mistake that the Palestinian leadership has committed (aside from its disgraceful disunity) was entrusting the US, Israel's main enabler, with managing a "peace process" that has allowed Israel time and resources to finish its colonial projects, while devastating Palestinian rights and political aspirations. Returning to the same old channels, using the same language, seeking salvation at the altar of the same old "two-state solution" will achieve nothing, but to waste further time and energy. It is Israel's obstinacy that is now leaving Palestinians (and Israelis) with one option, and only one option: equal citizenship in one single state or a horrific apartheid. No other "solution" suffices. In fact, the Regulation Bill is further proof that the Israeli government has already made its decision: consolidating apartheid in Palestine. If Trump and May find the logic of Netanyahu's apartheid acceptable, the rest of the world shouldn't. In the words of former President Jimmy Carter, "Israel will never find peace until it ... permit(s) the Palestinians to exercise their basic human and political rights." That Israeli "permission" is yet to arrive, leaving the international community with the moral responsibility to exact it.

• More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when) • Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts • More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

• Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

Communications from US phone numbers, the documents suggest, were removed (or “minimized”) from the database – but those of other countries, including the UK, were retained. The revelation the NSA is collecting and extracting personal information from hundreds of millions of global text messages a day is likely to intensify international pressure on US president Barack Obama, who on Friday is set to give his response to the report of his NSA review panel.

While US attention has focused on whether the NSA’s controversial phone metadata program will be discontinued, the panel also suggested US spy agencies should pay more consideration to the privacy rights of foreigners, and reconsider spying efforts against allied heads of state and diplomats. In a statement to the Guardian, a spokeswoman for the NSA said any implication that the agency’s collection was “arbitrary and unconstrained is false”. The agency’s capabilities were directed only against “valid foreign intelligence targets” and were subject to stringent legal safeguards, she said.

“In contrast to [most] GCHQ equivalents, DISHFIRE contains a large volume of unselected SMS traffic,” it states (emphasis original). “This makes it particularly useful for the development of new targets, since it is possible to examine the content of messages sent months or even years before the target was known to be of interest.” It later explains in plain terms how useful this capability can be. Comparing Dishfire favourably to a GCHQ counterpart which only collects against phone numbers that have specifically been targeted, it states “Dishfire collects pretty much everything it can, so you can see SMS from a selector which is not targeted”.

The document also states the database allows for broad, bulk searches of keywords which could result in a high number of hits, rather than just narrow searches against particular phone numbers: “It is also possible to search against the content in bulk (e.g. for a name or home telephone number) if the target’s mobile phone number is not known.” Analysts are warned to be careful when searching content for terms relating to UK citizens or people currently residing in the UK, as these searches could be successful but would not be legal without a warrant or similar targeting authority. However, a note from GCHQ’s operational legalities team, dated May 2008, states agents can search Dishfire for “events” data relating to UK numbers – who is contacting who, and when.

The N.S.A.’s protections for attorney-client conversations are narrowly crafted, said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s School of Law. The agency is barred from sharing with prosecutors intercepted attorney-client communications involving someone under indictment in the United States, according to previously disclosed N.S.A. rules. But the agency may still use or share the information for intelligence purposes. Andrew M. Perlman, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and technology issues, said the growth of surveillance was troubling for lawyers. He helped create the bar association’s ethics code revisions that require lawyers to try to avoid being overheard by eavesdroppers. “You run out of options very quickly to communicate with someone overseas,” he said. “Given the difficulty of finding anything that is 100 percent secure, lawyers are in a difficult spot to ensure that all of the information remains in confidence.” 

Still, the N.S.A. can intercept the communications of Americans if they are in contact with a foreign intelligence target abroad, such as Indonesian officials. The N.S.A. is then required to follow so-called minimization rules to protect their privacy, such as deleting the identity of Americans or information that is not deemed necessary to understand or assess the foreign intelligence, before sharing it with other agencies. An N.S.A. spokeswoman said the agency’s Office of the General Counsel was consulted when issues of potential attorney-client privilege arose and could recommend steps to protect such information. “Such steps could include requesting that collection or reporting by a foreign partner be limited, that intelligence reports be written so as to limit the inclusion of privileged material and to exclude U.S. identities, and that dissemination of such reports be limited and subject to appropriate warnings or restrictions on their use,” said Vanee M. Vines, the spokeswoman.

In justifying the agency’s sweeping powers, the Obama administration often emphasizes the N.S.A.’s role in fighting terrorism and cyberattacks, but disclosures in recent months from the documents leaked by Mr. Snowden show the agency routinely spies on trade negotiations, communications of economic officials in other countries and even foreign corporations.

Other documents obtained from Mr. Snowden reveal that the N.S.A. shares reports from its surveillance widely among civilian agencies. A 2004 N.S.A. document, for example, describes how the agency’s intelligence gathering was critical to the Agriculture Department in international trade negotiations. “The U.S.D.A. is involved in trade operations to protect and secure a large segment of the U.S. economy,” that document states. Top agency officials “often rely on SIGINT” — short for the signals intelligence that the N.S.A. eavesdropping collects — “to support their negotiations.”

Less dramatically but yet still with serious consequences, how is it that otherwise rational people come to accept the idea that widespread economic success can flow from the loins of a bureaucracy that produces nothing but regulatory chains on the aspirations of individuals looking to better their lives and those of their families? And when that success fails to materialize, readily accept the idea that the Fed can pump money out by the trillions with no negative effect? In any event, I started poking around the literature of various organizations specializing in the study of mind control and found what I think are some interesting lessons for us all in the studies of cults. After all, if psychological buttons can be pushed in a combination that leads to drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, you can sure as hell bet they can be pushed to get you to vote for a string of sociopathic poseurs… or to dedicate a large chunk of your life and charitable giving to causes that have little connection to reality. Or to decide to create a Facebook page titled, "I love it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President." In fact, based on the guidelines provided by the International Cult Studies Association (ICSA), you or someone you know may already be in a cult and not even be aware of it. Worse, the president himself might be the head of a cult! There are 15 separate traits the ICSA identifies as common among cults. Ticking through them should prove informative.

In researching the nature of cults, I took a side street to investigate the mental condition called "pseudologia fantastica," or in lay terms, a mental condition where individuals become pathological liars. I did so because I wondered how politicians can spew forth their untruths with straight faces.

According to the Senate report, Al Jazeera’s sources said, a majority of the more than 100 detainees held in CIA custody were detained in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Morocco, where they were subject to torture methods not sanctioned by the Justice Department. Those methods are recalled by the report in vivid narratives lifted from daily logs of the detention and interrogation of about 34 high-value prisoners. The report allegedly notes that about 85 detainees deemed low-value passed through the black sites and were later dumped at Guantánamo or handed off to foreign intelligence services. More than 10 of those handed over to foreign intelligence agencies “to face terrorism charges” are now “unaccounted for” and presumed dead, the U.S. officials said. The Senate report says more than two dozen of these men designated low-value had, in fact, been wrongfully detained and rendered to other countries on the basis of intelligence obtained from CIA captives under torture and from information shared with CIA officials by other governments, both of which turned out to be false. The report allegedly singles out a top CIA official for botching a handful of renditions and outlines agency efforts to cover up the mistakes. The Senate report allegedly accuses “senior CIA officials” of lying during multiple closed-session briefings to members of Congress from 2003 to 2005 about the use of certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The report says an agency official lied to Congress in 2005 when he insisted the U.S. was adhering to international treaties barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, the U.S. officials told Al Jazeera.

The report not only accuses certain CIA officials of deliberately misleading Congress; Al Jazeera’s sources say it also suggests that the agency sanctioned leaks to selected journalists about phantom plots supposedly disrupted as a result of information gained through the program in order to craft a narrative of success. The Senate report, like a 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF), says Air Force psychologists under contract to the CIA reverse-engineered a decades-old resistance-training program taught to U.S. airmen known as survival evasion resistance escape (SERE). According to a SERE training document obtained by Al Jazeera titled “Coercive Exploitation Techniques,” Air Force personnel were taught that communist regimes used “deprivations” of “food, water, sleep and medical care” as well as “the use of threats” in order to weaken a captive’s mental and physical ability to resist interrogation. “Isolation” would be used, according to the SERE program, to deprive the “recipient of all social support” so that he develops a “dependency” on his interrogator. And “physical duress, violence and torture” are used to weaken “mental and physical ability to resist exploitation.” Ironically, perhaps, the SERE document (displayed below) notes that such techniques were used by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea to obtain false confessions.

Senate investigators allegedly obtained from the CIA a 2003 “business plan,” written by Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, that contained erroneous details about the positive aspects of the enhanced interrogation program and the veracity of the intelligence its extracted from detainees. The “business plan” states that Al-Qaeda captives were “resistant” to “standard” interrogation techniques, an argument the Senate report found lacked merit because torture techniques were used before they were even questioned. Neither Jessen, who lives in Spokane, Wash., nor Mitchell, who resides in Land o’ Lakes, Fla., responded to phone calls or emails for comment. Both men are featured prominently in the Senate’s report, according to U.S. officials.

According to Al Jazeera’s sources, Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah was the only captive subjected to all 10 torture techniques identified in an August 2002 Justice Department memo. But the U.S. officials said the Senate report concludes that the methods applied to Abu Zubaydah went above and beyond the guidelines outlined in that memo and were used before the memo establishing their legality was written. The Senate report allegedly adopts part of a narrative from former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at the black site and wrote in his book “The Black Banners” that Mitchell was conducting an “experiment” on Abu Zubaydah. For example, the August 2002 Justice Department legal memo authorized sleep deprivation for Abu Zubaydah for 11 consecutive days, but Mitchell kept him awake far longer, the U.S. officials said, citing classified CIA cables. Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, strapped into a chair and doused with cold water to keep him awake. He was then interrogated and asked what he knew, at which point, his attorney told Al Jazeera, Abu Zubaydah was “psychotic” and would have admitted to anything.

Additionally, the report allegedly says that Abu Zubaydah was stuffed into a pet crate (the type used to transport dogs on airplanes) over the course of two weeks and routinely passed out, was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell and subjected to an endless loop of loud music. One former interrogator briefed about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations from May to July 2002 told Al Jazeera that the music used to batter the detainee’s senses was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, hopes the Senate report’s executive summary will vindicate what he has been saying for years. “My client was tortured brutally well before any legal memo was issued,” Mickum said. He expects the report to “show that my client was a nonmember of Al-Qaeda, contrary to all of the earlier reports by the Bush administration. I am also confident that the report will show that, after he was deemed to be compliant while he was held in Thailand, that he continued to be tortured on explicit orders from the Bush administration.” The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that CIA interrogators were under an enormous pressure from top agency officials, themselves under pressure from the White House, to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques to obtain information from detainees connecting Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

One interrogator who worked for the CIA and the U.S. military during Bush’s tenure and participated in the interrogations of two high-value CIA prisoners told Al Jazeera — speaking on condition of anonymity because he is still employed by the U.S. government — that the “enhanced” interrogation program was “nothing more than the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.” (The 1971 Stanford University study shocked the public by demonstrating how easily people placed in authority over more vulnerable others resorted to cruelty.) “Interrogators were being pressured — You have to get info from these people,’” the interrogator told Al Jazeera. “There was no consideration that the person we were interrogating may not know. That was always seen as a resistance technique. ‘They [the detainees] must be lying!’ There was pressure on us from above to produce what they wanted. Not a single person I worked with knew how to conduct an interrogation or [had] ever conducted an interrogation.”

As one could imagine, a trove of information like this would be an identity thief’s paradise.  As Rep. Randy Neugebauer said to the Washington Examiner, “If someone were to breach that system, they could very easily steal somebody’s identity.” Like so many parts of the federal government, the National Mortgage Database was never authorized by Congress and was certainly not authorized by the constitution.

Of course, the success of Moscow's campaign to switch its trading to rubles or other regional currencies will depend on the willingness of its trading partners to get rid of the dollar. Sources cited by Politonline.ru mentioned two countries who would be willing to support Russia: Iran and China. Given that Vladimir Putin will visit Beijing on May 20, it can be speculated that the gas and oil contracts that are going to be signed between Russia and China will be denominated in rubles and yuan, not dollars. In other words, in one week's time look for not only the announcement of the Russia-China "holy grail" gas agreement described previously here, but its financial terms, which now appears virtually certain will be settled exclusively in RUB and CNY. Not USD. And as we have explained repeatedly in the past, the further the west antagonizes Russia, and the more economic sanctions it lobs at it, the more Russia will be forced away from a USD-denominated trading system and into one which faces China and India. Which is why next week's announcement, as groundbreaking as it most certainly will be, is just the beginning.

Sanders noted the large fines and settlement paid by big financial institutions since 2009, totaling $176 billion, and referenced former attorney general Eric Holder’s frank admission in 2013 that some banks are “too big to jail.” (Holder later walked back that comment, though no high-level executives have gone to prison for anything related to the financial crisis.)

The duo also described their belief that big Wall Street banks are crushing smaller and medium-sized banks. Sherman cited research from the International Monetary Fund that when big banks have implicit taxpayer backing, their access to capital is so much easier that it amounts to an extra $83 billion annually—something he argued was an unfair advantage over smaller banks that would be allowed to fail. The Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents 6,000 smaller banks, has endorsed the Sanders-Sherman legislation. Beyond just small banks, Sanders argued that enormous financial institutions harm the broader economy because those smaller banks are key sources of capital for small businesses. “Wall Street cannot be an island unto itself separate from the productive economy,” he said.

The staff of The Fifth Column will spend the day contacting every media outlet in our phone books to make this the story of the day. We will do our best make the list of companies to be boycotted viral on every social media outlet in existence. Instead of silencing free speech, you’re going to learn what it is. The companies currently on the BDS list are listed below:

In 2009 -10 the Saudi-led war against Houthi rebels the Gulf Kingdom’s military lost some 200 troops before it left Yemen again. The Saudi-led war is, in so many words, not merely a war in “its backyard, Yemen”, but very much a war that aims at quelling domestic unrest and insurgents in an environment that becomes increasingly hostile to the absolute monarchy Saudi Arabia – the USA tentatively included. Houthi spokespersons are confident that they have the strategic edge in a ground war, even if it includes a few token U.S. troops, who, arguably, would serve U.S. interests more than they would serve the interests of Saudi Arabia or, certainly, the interests of Egypt. Bombing the Houthi militia into submission is not likely to be a successful military strategy either. Thus far, the still legal, but not necessarily “legitimate” government of Yemen has waged six wars against Shi’ite Houthi in the northern highlands of Yemen between 2002 – 2009. None of these campaigns has shown any decisive military success, but it has, according to many outraged Yemeni MPs, Houthi as well as Yemen’s military and police strengthened Al-Qaeda’s position in the country and sabotaged rather than supported the Yemeni military’s fight against Al-Qaeda. All that, with a helping hand from Washington.

Meanwhile, the Security Council called on an immediate end to hostilities. Houthi representatives would say that anyone, the Security Council included, who endorses the bombing of Yemen would have to answer to the people of Yemen. Looking at the track record of this most August Security Council one must conclude that the post-WW II victor’s instrument for carving out global hegemonic zones answers to nobody. It didn’t function when Yemen was fighting a proxy cold war civil war, and it is equally defunct today where the pretext has shifted from socialism vs capitalism to a sectarian discourse. The fate of the people of Yemen is that the region’s poorest nation is located at two of the world’s most strategically important waters. Whoever controls the Arabian Sea controls the Suez Canal and the Persian / Arab Gulf. That is what Yemen is about. No degree of denial or propaganda can cover-up the fact that everyone, Saudi Arabia, the USA, EU, NATO, China, Russia, Egypt or Iran all have a stake in the region. Period!

“Every speculative bubble rests on some kind of a fairy tale, a story the bubble participants believe in and use as rationalization to buy extremely overvalued stocks or bonds or real estate,” Mr. Vogt argued. “And now it is the faith in the central-planning capabilities of global central bankers. When the loss of confidence in the Fed, the ECB etc. begins, the stampede out of stocks and bonds will start. I think we are very close to this pivotal moment in financial history.” But for the moment, the ridiculous stock market bubble continues.

Internet companies that didn’t even exist a decade ago are now supposedly worth billions upon billions of dollars even though some of them don’t make any money at all.  There is even a name for this phenomenon.  Internet companies that have gigantic valuations without gigantic revenue streams are being called “unicorns”… A dizzying mix of bold ideas and lavish investments has catapulted dozens of privately held start-ups to unicorn status, defined as having market valuations of at least $1 billion often without soaring revenues to match. Social-sharing site Pinterest has soared to $11 billion. Ride-hailing company Uber is now worth a staggering $50 billion. How long can the party last?

Sadly, the truth is that Wall Street is headed for a very painful awakening. What we are experiencing right now is the greatest financial bubble of all time. What comes after that is going to be the greatest financial crash of all time. 199,000,000,000,000 dollars of debt is about to come crashing down, and the pain of this disaster will be felt by every man, woman and child on the entire planet.

SB1761 requires all five public retirement benefits systems of the Illinois Pension Code to divest “all direct holdings” from any company which engages in boycotting Israel. This is designed to financially punish companies which participate in BDS; presumably European companies. But it will also burden an already severely crippled,“worst in nation”, Illinois pension system. Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner was quoted by Jewish United Fund News (JUF) earlier this month as saying, “I made a pledge that Illinois would become the first state in America to divest its public pension funds from any company in the world that boycotts Israel.” Rauner includes U.S. companies in his threat of divestment when he says “any company in the world.”

Relatedly from SB1761 itself: “It is not the intent [of this bill]… to cause divestiture from any company based in the United States of America.” Not intended? This soft language clearly leaves the door open to require Illinois public retirement systems’ divestiture from U.S. companies that participate in BDS. So, while politicians endorsing this bill can point to this statement of “intent” as some kind of safeguard for American companies, this same sentence simultaneously functions as a veiled threat to those companies.

SB1761 characterizes the motivations of the BDS movement as “intending to penalize… Israel.” Similarly, JUF News this month quoted JUF President Steven B. Nasatir saying, “At the core of the BDS movement is a quest to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state.” That’s like stating that the intent of the Civil Rights Montgomery bus boycott was to “penalize white people.

now governments are discovering, too late, the true price of that confidence. The Kraftwerk Moorburg plant was controversial long before the case was filed. For years, local residents and environmental groups objected to its construction, amid growing concern over climate change and the impact the project would have on the Elbe river. In 2008, Vattenfall was granted a water permit for its Moorburg project, but, in response to local pressure, local authorities imposed strict environmental conditions to limit the utility’s water usage and its impact on fish. Vattenfall sued Hamburg in the local courts. But, as a foreign investor, it was also able to file a case at the ICSID. These environmental measures, it said, were so strict that they constituted a violation of its rights as guaranteed by the Energy Charter Treaty, a multilateral investment agreement signed by more than 50 countries, including Sweden and Germany. It claimed that the environmental conditions placed on its permit were so severe that they made the plant uneconomical and constituted acts of indirect expropriation.

While a tribunal cannot force a country to change its laws, or give a company a permit, the risk of massive damages may in some cases be enough to persuade a government to reconsider its actions. The possibility of arbitration proceedings can be used to encourage states to enter into meaningful settlement negotiations.

A small number of countries are now attempting to extricate themselves from the bonds of the investor-state dispute system. One of these is Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets of the country’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, to protest against a dramatic hike in water rates by a private company owned by Bechtel, the US civil engineering firm. During the demonstrations, the Bolivian government stepped in and terminated the company’s concession. The company then filed a $50m suit against Bolivia at the ICSID. In 2006, following a campaign calling for the case to be thrown out, the company agreed to accept a token payment of less than $1. After this expensive case, Bolivia cancelled the international agreements it had signed with other states giving their investors access to these tribunals. But getting out of this system is not easily done. Most of these international agreements have sunset clauses, under which their provisions remain in force for a further 10 or even 20 years, even if the treaties themselves are cancelled.

Increasingly, these suits are becoming valuable even before claims are settled. After Rurelec filed suit against Bolivia, it took its case to the market and secured a multimillion-dollar corporate loan, using its dispute with Bolivia as collateral, so that it could expand its business. Over the last 10 years, and particularly since the global financial crisis, a growing number of specialised investment funds have moved to raise money through these cases, treating companies’ multimillion-dollar claims against states as a new “asset class”.