If there’s a will and a plan, there’s a way: poverty, racism and climate change are political choices and don’t have to exist.

The present capitalist pandemic cannot effectively sustain life on earth.

It can only function through oppression, terror, plunder and crises.

The cost of living crisis, debt crisis, racist policing crisis, migrant deaths crisis, misogyny crisis, financial crisis, housing crisis, unemployment crisis, wages crisis, food price crisis, climate crisis, inflation crisis, renters crisis, ecological crisis, floods crisis, famine crisis, poverty crisis, mental health crisis, the constant war crisis, are not accidents; they’re all features of modern rampant neoliberal capitalism.

Human rights abuses, inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, patriarchy, debt bondage, neo-colonialism, ecocide/climate change etc. are inseparable from one another – solving one means solving all.

There’s no sustainable levelling-up under capitalism.

It’s why people, in citizen’s assemblies, need to write the rules.

It’s why system change is so urgent.

$16 trillion in global financial markets is the estimated value of what they trade and ‘steal’ from us each day.

It’s equivalent to today’s value of reparations for slavery and colonialism and the value of past and future instilled labour of all workers – in global north and south.

An initial one per cent Financial Transaction Tax, FTT, would raise $16 billion per day ($40 trillion p.a.) for global UN funds and solve forever all our wildest dreams of well-funded essential people’s services for everyone.

Present financial transaction data already shows the buyer, seller and value of trades sent through SWIFT, a financial messaging system that links up to banks, brokers, exchanges, clearing houses, payment systems and governments.

The basic technical architecture is already in place for FTT’s installation:

· Legislation could easily create and resource Revolutionary Reparations funds;

· Appropriating and modifying SWIFT’s payments systems to collect the tax through the financial markets and pay into the democratically controlled RR UN Funds;

· Using these funds for healing and repair from slavery and colonialism, whilst eradicating hunger, poverty, destitution, debt, with everyone living with dignity;

· Increasing the tax rate so as to weaken capitalism and build a global democratic political economy for humanity's emancipation and freedom, ending capitalist evils.

(Note: G7 countries dominate trading activity where legislation would have to be passed after an unprecedented, sustained, strategic and coordinated global campaign; the real hard work for millions of people.

Study www.revolutionaryreparations.org.uk)

Progressive Greens and Liberals GO!

 

Alan Debenham

49 Clifford Avenue, Taunton, TA2 6DL