At UN, French President Sarkozy Demands Financial Transaction Tax on Banks; Tobin Genie Now Out of the Bottle Worldwide; Time to Mobilize Against Finance Capital on This Issue

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
September 22, 2010

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken the magic words: “Tax the banks,” and this is the big news from the opening day of this year’s UN General Assembly plenary session in New York. For reasons which have much to do with internal French political struggles, Sarkozy has thus placed the central question of the age on the international agenda: Who will pay the costs of the world economic depression? Will it be the bankers, speculators, derivatives mongers, asset strippers, and hedge fund hyenas who have created the current depression through the bubble economy of the last decades? Or, as the Koch-headed dupes of the Tea Party demand, will the cost of the depression be taken out of the hide of average working people around the globe under the banner of “free-market” swindles once again?

The financial transaction tax is the key to making the bankers pay for their own crimes.



“We have no right to shelter behind the economic crisis as supposed grounds for doing less,” said Sarkozy, who noted that government budgets are everywhere under tremendous pressure. “Finance has globalized, so why should we not ask finance to participate in stabilizing the world by taking a tax on each financial transaction?” “I want to tell you of my conviction that while all developed countries are in deficit, we must find new sources of financing for the struggle against poverty, for education and for the ending of the planet’s big pandemics.”1 Sarkozy stressed that he intends to campaign for the bank tax when France assumes the presidency is head of the Group of 20 and Group of Eight countries for a year, starting in November. That will keep the Tobin tax in the public eye over the next 14 months, at minimum.

What Sarkozy has thus proposed under the name of financial transaction tax is none other than the Tobin tax, the Wall Street sales tax, the securities transfer tax, or Robin Hood tax, which this website has long advocated. As Sarkozy specified, the financial transaction tax, like a sales tax, would take a small percentage of financial turnover and use the proceeds for purposes of world economic development. Naturally, the really critical questions are how big this percentage will be, who will collect it, and how it will be used. Now that Sarkozy has broached the issue before the court of world public opinion, all of these questions are very much up for debate. Sarkozy himself probably imagines the financial transaction tax as flowing into the coffers of the International Monetary Fund, where it would not be used primarily to fight world poverty, but rather to help pay off the debts of Third World countries which are beyond insolvency. Such an outcome must be opposed at all costs. Continue reading At UN, French President Sarkozy Demands Financial Transaction Tax on Banks; Tobin Genie Now Out of the Bottle Worldwide; Time to Mobilize Against Finance Capital on This Issue
The financial transaction tax is the key to making the bankers pay for their own crimes.
“We have no right to shelter behind the economic crisis as supposed grounds for doing less,” said Sarkozy, who noted that government budgets are everywhere under tremendous pressure. “Finance has globalized, so why should we not ask finance to participate in stabilizing the world by taking a tax on each financial transaction?” “I want to tell you of my conviction that while all developed countries are in deficit, we must find new sources of financing for the struggle against poverty, for education and for the ending of the planet’s big pandemics.”¹ Sarkozy stressed that he intends to campaign for the bank tax when France assumes the presidency is head of the Group of 20 and Group of Eight countries for a year, starting in November. That will keep the Tobin tax in the public eye over the next 14 months, at minimum.
What Sarkozy has thus proposed under the name of financial transaction tax is none other than the Tobin tax, the Wall Street sales tax, the securities transfer tax, or Robin Hood tax, which this website has long advocated. As Sarkozy specified, the financial transaction tax, like a sales tax, would take a small percentage of financial turnover and use the proceeds for purposes of world economic development. Naturally, the really critical questions are how big this percentage will be, who will collect it, and how it will be used. Now that Sarkozy has broached the issue before the court of world public opinion, all of these questions are very much up for debate. Sarkozy himself probably imagines the financial transaction tax as flowing into the coffers of the International Monetary Fund, where it would not be used primarily to fight world poverty, but rather to help pay off the debts of Third World countries which are beyond insolvency. Such an outcome must be opposed at all costs. Continue reading At UN, French President Sarkozy Demands Financial Transaction Tax on Banks; Tobin Genie Now Out of the Bottle Worldwide; Time to Mobilize Against Finance Capital on This Issue