GAZETTE ENVIRONMENT PAGE

'GREEN FOCUS'- WEALTH TAX URGENCY.

by Alan Debenham.

IT'S not just me and my Green Party stating the vital urgency for Britain to have a hard-hitting ‘wealth tax’ in next week’s Budget.

Recent World Economic Forum’s January meeting in Davos strongly supported it, bringing us in line with most other affluent nations.

Ending obscene inequality, which has been such a big part of ‘ruling class’ global and British capitalism for centuries, is as much a part of green argument for global and British climate justice, as it’s one for seeking essential parallel social justice.

This means rating profits of corporations, property owners, investors and banks as well below the survival needs of both people and nature, plus getting all prominent religions in the world to both preach and practice their ‘faiths’ of heavenly ‘spiritual’ rewards coming only from self-sacrifice and frugal consumption, with hell’s fiery torture kept for self-indulgent private material wealth and greed.

It’s weird how both government politicians and religious priests are getting away with telling the persistent lies of how they, and British people in general, follow so-called ‘Christian’, or ‘religious faith’, values, when they all support and collaborate in all-powerful, omnipresent, self-indulgent capitalism, with all its private individual - or family - extremely unequal monetary and property ownership.

So everywhere our very ‘technically modern’ 21st century still stupidly harbours the climate ‘death wish’ of wealth and greed commanding power and privilege.

Most ordinary folk don’t even know how the property and financial guts of capitalism actually runs, or who owns what and how they got it - despite inadequate national Land Registry and HMRC records.

In fact, ask any student from top Somerset schools or FE colleges, 'Who owns your town, or how is money created and controlled, or what is usury and who fixes exchange and interest rates?' you’ll get the same 'don’t know' blank answer.

Oxfam research, helped by Guardian and Morning Star papers and educated by huge multi-national corporations, recently concentrating down globally from about 15,000 to 1,500, shows that over half global wealth is now controlled by about a dozen to 15 super-rich ‘family dynasties’, with the UK controlled by a mere five or six.

This vast moral corruption centres upon Monaco’s ‘monstrous rich’ and Bahamas’ ‘offshore buck-aneers’, all living in sumptuous secrecy and luxury.

Don’t believe me? Just internet search both 'Panama' (2016) and 'Pandora' ( 2021) papers.

Christianity’s Sermon on the Mount call to bless the poor and damn the rich and give-up all your possessions, trying to pass through the ‘eye of a needle’, become totally daft in capitalism’s endless obsession with growth and greed, with future life’s survival now resting on urgent carefully planned de-growth and recession.