Re: Disarming the Markets

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sid's friend Erin need not be shy about it; at least one other is ready
to go public with confusion about current cliches taken for granted.

> This artificial world state is a power with no base in society. It is
> answerable instead to the financial markets and the mammoth business
> undertakings that are its masters. The result is that the real states
> in the real world are becoming societies with no power base.

Could not this have been said, and with great paranoia, by half of Europe's
bankers and royal treasurers about that crass young transatlantic mongrel,
America, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase?

> The task of disarming this financial power must be given top priority if
> the law of the jungle is not to take over completely in the next century.

Say what?  Shall we poll the despised minorities of this continent
to determine when said law had already triumphed completely?

> The power to levy taxes on unearned income is a sine qua non of democracy.
> Such income should be taxed at exactly the same rate as earned income.
> But this is not the case anywhere, least of all in the European Union.

I suppose the term "unearned income" has a consensual meaning other than
inheritance, but I'm not sure I know what it is.  The self-satisfied gent
in the Smith Barney ads makes it clear, after all, that he and his august
colleagues make money the "old fashioned way," which is not by sewing up
baseballs in a maquiladora.  Will the real earned income please stand up?

> Why not set up a new worldwide non-governmental organisation, Action for
> a Tobin Tax to Assist the Citizen (ATTAC)? With the trade unions and the
> many social, cultural and ecological organisations, it could exert
> formidable pressure on governments to introduce this tax at last, in the
> name of universal solidarity.

In Paris in 1871, as well as in other places and times, that potent NGO
called The Aroused Masses learned _post facto_ that its might depended on
strictly shunning the remaining government, which always stood ready to
bestow the kiss of death upon revolution.  I doubt that Warren Wagar's
World Party would fare any better, whether or not it forthrightly
by-passed the pathetic American working class.
I doubt, in fact, that revolution today is a matter of compelling
new laws, and a new paradigm will not bloom at anyone's command.

                                                                    valis