Don't mess with the Dutch, they'll enslave you to harvest their spices.*
From The Wall Street Journal, December 5:
The group wants to use European law as a shield to disrupt American infrastructure projects.
A North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace in March to pay pipeline company Energy Transfer $667 million for the environmental group’s rogue campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Now, Greenpeace is trying to get a Dutch court to nullify the jury award, which the trial judge reduced to $345 million in October. Energy Transfer is asking the North Dakota Supreme Court to block the activist group’s attempt to end-run the U.S. legal system. If Greenpeace’s efforts succeed, they would harm much more than the pipeline company. They’d open the door for activists to torpedo other American critical infrastructure projects under European law.
The Dakota Access Pipeline saga started a decade ago when activists descended on North Dakota in hope of halting the project. During the monthslong standoff, reports spread of protesters shackling themselves to equipment, blow-torching parts of the pipeline, and hurling feces and burning logs at workers.
The chaos delayed the project, costing the parent company and partner entities an estimated $7.5 billion or more. The federal government was ordered to pay North Dakota $28 million in damages. Kelcy Warren, then Energy Transfer’s CEO, didn’t take those losses sitting down. “What they did to us is wrong,” he said in 2017 of the environmental groups behind the demonstrations, “and they’re going to pay for it.”
Energy Transfer identified two U.S.-based Greenpeace entities and the umbrella group Greenpeace International as the ringleaders responsible for the pipeline fiasco. During a three-week trial in March, the pipeline company presented evidence that Greenpeace personnel funded and trained protestors and even equipped them with lockboxes to chain themselves to pipeline equipment. It also said that Greenpeace attempted to deprive the project of funding by falsely claiming the pipeline would encroach on tribal land. Greenpeace tried to distance itself from the violent conflict surrounding the pipeline. But the group couldn’t take back a 2016 email from Greenpeace USA’s executive director stating the “massive” support it provided to the protests. The jury returned a nine-figure verdict, including $400 million in punitive damages.
Greenpeace had a Plan B, however. On the eve of the trial, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit with the District Court of Amsterdam, where the group is based. The suit claims that Energy Transfer’s litigation violated Greenpeace International’s rights under the European Union’s 2024 anti-Slapp law, an anagram for strategic litigation against public participation. The law seeks to protect journalists and nonprofit organizations from meritless lawsuits designed to silence or intimidate them.
Greenpeace’s case isn’t an ordinary appeal, in which a party asks a higher court to review a lower court’s application of the law. Rather, Greenpeace is asking a Dutch court to reassess the merits of the North Dakota case under Europe’s sweeping anti-Slapp directive. The case marks the first attempt to apply the law “extraterritorially” to stymie a lawsuit brought in a country outside the European Union.
If the European directive achieves this reach, it would extend the EU’s regulatory imperialism to the political and social spheres where Europe and America follow starkly different legal norms: In a nutshell, Europe’s speech rules are based on values, while America’s are based on rights.
The European law used by Greenpeace illustrates this contrast. While 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have anti-Slapp laws, these statutes are more targeted than those in Europe. They safeguard legally protected speech and lay out the process for dismissing suits targeting public discourse.
The EU law goes beyond protecting free-speech rights. It gives European courts significant leeway to relitigate American cases when the result doesn’t conform to their values. Under the EU directive, courts can award damages to parties that have been subjected to “abusive court proceedings,” including those involving “an imbalance of power between the parties” or “excessive” claims.
Greenpeace claims in the Dutch lawsuit that the financial resources of Energy Transfer constitute an “obvious” imbalance of power and that the company’s demands for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages are “clearly excessive.” But the rule of law is based on whether the parties acted within their legal rights, not on whether they happen to run a successful business like Energy Transfer that is seriously affected by a shutdown in operations. If Greenpeace succeeds, expect other activist organizations to incorporate in Europe so they can wiggle out of liability by invoking the EU’s loosely drawn “abusive court proceeding” standard against U.S. companies....
....I am about as ignorant of Dutch electoral politics as one can be. Besides knowing the Dutch histories of imperialism, financial innovation, art and reinsurance ("...Not to mention the herverzekering crowd in Amsterdam, they're tough bastards.") I am dumb as a bag of rocks about The Netherlands....But I do know one other thing: "That time the Dutch ate their prime minister".
Here's some financial reporting Dutch Masters style:
(VOC) $64.98 +$13.84 (+27.1%) Shares in the spice purveyor soared on word that the three sturdy galleons dispatched two years afore had been sighted off the coast of Cape Verde, returning from their dangerous voyage to the exotic Orient with their casks brimful of redolent cinnamon, cardamom, and mysteriously intoxicating curried powder.
Oops, wrong century.
note: link to The Onion rotted, apparently un-Googleable as well. I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.
I mentioned, in November 2019's "How Technology is Changing the Spice Trade":
I bet those fat Dutch burghers didn't care about the Banda Islanders.And I guess we didn't either. There's only one reference on the blog, and that's in a post on the wealth extracted from the silver mines at Potosi Bolivia:...
Well, we came back with "Spices/Shipping: The (Hidden) History of The Nutmeg Island That Was Traded for Manhattan" and it is a nasty story of slavery and depopulation bordering on genocide....
"Psychopaths in the Netherlands are different from psychopaths in the US"
Yes.
They say verzekering and herverzekering rather than insurance and reinsurance.
And a Nobel Laureate before he got the :
"Mokyr: 'How Europe became so rich":
Because Dutch is the language of love?
No?
Then I give up. How did Europe become so rich?
On the other hand, back in 2013 we noted:
Oh Yeah, The Rijksmuseum Reopened: The Nightwatch Flash Mob
...It took ten years of screw-ups but the museum finally reopened and although most folks in Amsterdam seem to hate the building they like what's inside and most any Dutch kid knows Rembrandt's The Nightwatch:
So the flashmob went off to greater effect than it might have done, say,
in Chicago where they have a very different kind of flash mob.
Here's the version uploaded by ING:
