Yes, Bush is BAD, but many of the election issues are/were predicated in International concepts that have been digging in for years. NAFTA, WTO, FTAA, ETCETERA. Outsourcing, Tax Free Places for Plutocrats, Financial gambling (Yes, that's what it is) with Pensions, Healthcare Systems, and other assorted Social Democratic institutions. Basically turning the World into a Giant Las Vegas where some jackass in Montana can make a few bucks on the privatisation of some factory worker's pension, not bloody cool in my opinion.
Financial Markets are running amok and frankly unless something is done to Democratise the process there will be hell to pay.
Sooo...ATTAC, the Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, was started up in 1998 to address this crap.
It's premise is to promote an international tax on currency speculation (the Tobin Tax) and outlaw tax havens, replace pension funds with state pensions, cancel Third World debt, reform (or abolish, my prefered action) the World Trade Organisation & in the bigger picture establish democratic control over the financial world.
From the ATTAC
website, "Platform of the international movement ATTAC".
"The total freedom of capital circulation, the existence of tax havens, and the explosion of the volume of speculative transactions have forced governments into a frantic race to win the favor of big investors. Every day, one hundred billion dollars pass through the currency markets in search of instant profits, with no relation to the state of production or to trade in goods and services. The consequences of this state of affairs are the permanent increase of income on capital at the expense of labor, a pervasive economic insecurity, and the growth of poverty."
"There is still time to put the brakes on most of these machines for creating inequalities between North and South as well as in the heart of the developed countries themselves. Too often, the argument of inevitability is reinforced by censorship of information about alternatives.
Thus international financial institutions and the major media (whose owners are often beneficiaries of globalization) have been silent about the proposal of the American economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin, to tax speculative transactions on currency markets. Even at the particularly low rate of 0.1%, the Tobin Tax would bring in close to $100 billion every year. Collected for the most part by industrialized countries, where the principal financial markets are located, this money could be used to help struggle against inequalities, to promote education and public health in poor countries, and for food security and sustainable development. Such a measure fits with a clearly antispeculative perspective. It would sustain a logic of resistance, restore maneuvering room to citizens and national governments, and, most of all, would mean that political, rather than financial considerations are returning to the fore."
"To this end, signatories propose to participate or to cooperate with the international movement ATTAC to debate, produce and disseminate information, and act together, in their respective countries as well as on the continental and international levels. This joint actions have the following goals:
- to hamper international speculation;
- to tax income on capital;
- to penalize tax havens;
- to prevent the generalization of pension funds;
- to promote transparency in investments in dependant countries;
- to establish a legal framework for banking and financial operations, in order not to penalize further consumers and citizens; the employees of banking institutions can play an important role in overseeing these operations;
- to support the demand for the general annulment of the public debt of dependent countries, and the use of the resources thus freed in behalf of populations and sustainable development, which many call paying off the "social and ecological debt."
It's not that complicated.
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