We stand with protesters all around the world that are calling for real democracy!

Only if we are united in solidarity we will be able to not only change democracy on the local level, but also make international institutions democratic, which is extremly important, because for the most part it is the democratic deficit on the global level that destroys our democracies. As a recent article in The Guardian explains, it might be the lack of democracy at the global level that will bring down the arab spring. I strongly recommend reading ”The IMF versus the Arab spring“.

Photo: Spanish Revolution by Mauro A. Fuentes Álvarez via Flickr
And would it not be possible to write a similar article “The IMF versus the Spanish Revolution“? Don’t we almost always face the power of the global financial market when we go and fight for democracy at the local or national level?

In the Guardian article the author quotes a tweet by Paul Kingsnorth: “Could someone please arrest the head of the IMF for screwing the poor for 60 years?”

I personally would not necessarily say that it was the head of the IMF that is responsible for currently more than 1.000.000.000 people going to bed hungry every day. In my opinion it is the whole system of global governance that is to blame. And it is not only to blame for “screwing the poor” in the Global South, but also for destroying the middle class in western countries. It urgently needs to be reformed and democratized!

Here a nice video based on a lecture given by George Monbiot

Video: Photocopy Democracy by T.D.

Egality activists are currently involved and help organize pro-democracy protests world-wide: in Cairo, Palestine, La Havre,  Madrid, Berlin and London. Wherever they happen, we support democratic revolutions, and couple our support with a call to globalise them. If you want to take part: get in touch!

All barriers to migration are selective (Banksy, West Bank)

As the UK government continues to deport migrants back to Afghanistan and Iraq, the same immigration law encourages the hyper-wealthy (many with dubious sources of income) to freely become permanent UK residents.

As Private Eye reports this week:

“..the requirements for permanent residence will be relaxed for anybody with £5m to place in a UK bank, and made easier still for those with £10m to spare.”

So if you’ve got stacks of cash (HMG doesn’t mind where you get it from) then you can move where you like. If you’re a foreign student, however, or fleeing from instability in places like Iraq and Afghanistan then it’s tough luck.

Reminds me of when I was up in Sheffield working on a film for City of Sanctuary. I got chatting to one Iranian migrant who had been here in the UK for nine years and still didn’t have any official reply on whether he could legally remain or not.

He said to me the UK’s migration system was just like the slave trade of old:

“It’s like they look at your teeth, and the healthy ones who can work to make them rich can stay. The other ones they just throw away.”

- AM

It’s often like that with historic moments, they get missed by the media. Yesterday, in London, in a ‘March for Alternatives’, 500,000 people called for a global tax regime as the main alternative for national cuts.

A group of us, Egality activists, went on the march to give out leaflets, supporting the call for a global tax regime and saying: ‘Yes to global taxation, not without global representation’.

The main aim of the march yesterday was to show that there are alternative to the cuts. Looking at the text explaining the march’s aims, it’s evident that what they are suggesting are in fact global governance solutions. They call for a clamp down on tax havens (a global problem) and for creating global taxation: an “alternative in which rich individuals and big companies have to pay all their tax, that the banks pay a Robin Hood tax”. As big companies, rich individuals and banks are all global this cannot be a national policy. In fact, what they are calling for is a global tax regime, and I believe that in retrospect this moment will be seen as a historic moment for the labour movement and for the world. But you can’t read this in mass media‘s coverage, that focuses on the violence and arrests.

Bellow I am attaching the leaflet we gave in the march, titled ‘No Taxation Without Representation’. The ideas in leaflet, I hope, will one day be developed into a more substantial text.

The leaflet aimes to explain (popularly, in simple non-academic words) what the unions are doing, why it’s great and what’s missing:

What are the unions doing? Like explained above, they suggest a global alternative for a national policy.

Why is it great? Because it’s the only way to win, globally. Leftwing politics, from centre to communism/anarchism, will lose if they are only a local or national political project. In an age of economic globalisation, when capital easily cross borders and people cannot – left politics (or even right politics if they support some form of welfare) are under increased pressure to scale back. Yes, leftwing politics can win small victories, but with intensified economic globalisation, it cannot but lose the war. This is why we are seeing a retreat of the welfare state, and a victory of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic ideology, in the last 40 years. It is not random that this period correlates with a period of economic globalisation. This is not a completely new idea – Harvard’s economist Dani Rodrick, The Guaridan’s George Monbiot, the marxist thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood, writer Arundhati Roy, LSE’s David Held and Mary Kaldor and many more talked about this already, although very few made this a central argument for stronger global governance or for global democracy. Indeed, many make this an argument for reversing globalisation, but from many reasons, that will be discussed elsewhere, this is probably unrealistic (North Korea is a great illustration why, Brazil too).

What is new is that this idea – that the solution to globlising economy is to globalise governance – is starting to get into the general leftwing political discourse.

What’s missing? The leaflet also said that a global tax regime must be accompanied by global representation – global democratic control or global democratic institutions. This is because a tax regime have to relay on global institutions for enforcement – how can you prevent tax havens, a global problem, without global enforcement? How do you enforce global policies without global institutions? And our current global institutions are undemocratic, controlled (formally, legally) by a handful of rich governments. Giving them more power is giving more power to those that created this problem – how could that be a solution? So updating an old call we said: ‘yes to global taxation, no without global representation’.

And now the question that remains is – how do we make this idea really sink with unions and leftwing activists? Not only in the UK but everywhere in the world? Perhaps that’s the oldest question in the book – how do you make left politics international?

What makes me happy is that more  people are starting to ask this question and suggest answers, around the world. Yesterday in London, there were 500,000 of us.

***

[And here's a link to the Egality Leaflet from yesterday in a PDF format]

Why the fight for global taxation must also be a fight for global democratic institutions

Our unions are right.

The only alternative to the cuts is global: fighting global tax-havens and creating global taxation.

But there should be no global taxation without global representation.

If we globalise taxes we have to make sure we globalise democratic control, that we democratise global institutions.

Why fight for global taxation?

Our unions are right when they fight for global taxation – a global clamp on tax havens, and a system of global taxes. Indeed, from radical to mainstream, the political projects of the left are all dead as national projects in an age of globalisation. Socialism, social democracy, the welfare state, even social-anarchism and communism – these are all dead if they are only for national solutions. Today, leftwing politics can only survive as a global political project.

Why? This is because markets are global and democracy is not. Global markets mean that money can cross borders and escape our democratic control. If we vote for national tax, multinationals corporations (like the banks or Vodafone) can very easily move somewhere else. Multinational come to our national governments and threaten that ‘such high taxes make it unprofitable to be here, we’ll produce somewhere else, with lower taxes’ or ‘with such high taxes we are less competitive then companies in other countries, we will have to lay-off workers’. Additionally, in a global economy multinationals can report that they make profit in countries where taxation on profit is lower (these are tax havens).

Our unions argue for a fantastic solution – if instead of national tax policies we have global tax policies, we’ve won the war. If we have global taxation, multinationals and capital can’t escape anymore. They can’t run away to where taxes are lower, because there is simply nowhere to go to. We can get back the control we had before the age of economic globalisation – but now on a global scale.

But global taxation is not enough.

Why fight for global representation?

Our unions also miss a crucial part of the solution – the need for global democracy. If we want to create global taxation or globally clamp down on tax havens, we need to rely on global institutions to do the job. There is no way to enforce global policies without global institutions, old or new.

“No taxation without representation,” shouted citizens in British colonies 250 years ago. They were rightly saying that they would not agree to be subjected to policies (taxes) over which they had no democratic control. There is no reason why this will be different this time. The only global institutions we have today are undemocratic: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations Security Council are all controlled by the rich and powerful governments and the lobbyists of multinational corporations.

People hate these global intuitions because they are undemocratic. They are right. We should not give more power to global institutions without us having global democratic control; without representation; without us having a say. That means either a radical democratic reform of global institutions, or the creation of new, democratic, global institutions. Yes, global taxation is the solution, but global taxation needs to come with global democracy. Otherwise we just give power to those who created the problem.

Around the world, many support globalising democracy. Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, wants to have regular global referendums. George Monbiot, the Guardian’s columnist, suggests to create a world parliament with consultative powers. Albert Einstein wanted world federalism. Boutrus-Boutrus Ghali, former head of the UN, wants to add a directly elected second chamber to the UN – a UN Parliamentary Assembly. All these ideas have problems, but they all provide a starting point for a discussion we must have – how to globalise democracy.

Join us in an old-new call: No global taxation without global representation.

Yes to global taxation, but not without globalising democratic control, not without democratic global institutions.

Oh the bloody irony. While the fighter jets of the US, UK and France drop bombs on Libya in the name of freedom and democracy, few are bothering to point out the undemocratic process that sent them there.

At a national level the situation is pretty dire.

Last night, after a debate in the UK parliament, 557 MPs voted to support military intervention while only 13 opposed it. That’s 98% political support for an invasion that only a minority of the UK population think is a good idea (45% by this morning’s poll).

That’s a pretty shocking disparity between politicians and populace but in itself it’s not undemocratic. It just suggests that UK MPs are more belligerent than their constituents.

The real problem arises when you look to the global level.

In every press conference and every statement made by the western powers attacking Libya, justification for their actions is drawn back to the position of the international community. “The UN backs the no-fly zone”. “The international community wants Gaddafi to go”. “The world demands it”. Even The Guardian claims “Cameron built an international consensus” for Gaddafi to go.

But is that true?

There is no institution that represents the international community when it comes to military intervention, the closest we have is the UN Security Council, which, upon closer inspection, is about as democratic as Libya itself.

The 15 countries who sit on the UNSC represent 53% of the world’s population – not a great start. That means nearly half the planet is not even part of the debate around these critical international issues.

And it gets even worse.

If we look at the Libya resolution, the countries that actually support the resolution represent only 19% of the UNSC or 10% of the global population (table below).

So the bottom line is that we have a resolution that was supported by diplomats from ten countries who together represent 10% of the world’s population.

Does 10% mean international consensus to you?

And herein lies the problem. The fundamental difficulty in taking any sort of legitimate international action – on war, migration, poverty or climate change – is that we don’t have the means to make those decisions in a way that’s even vaguely democratic.

Before bombing democracy into Libya, maybe we should think about sorting out our own flawed institutions.

I’m sure some of you have heard about Diaspora, the new ‘anti-facebook’ which is going to be decentralised with lots of privacy. Should be coming out later in September.

Well a couple of things:

1. I think we should host a ‘hub’ or whatever they’re called. Basically, any web server can run a local diaspora that links to all the others.
2. We should get thinking, creating, coding some new collaborating/voting tools.

I could be totally wrong, but I’m getting the inkling that this could be the platform that turns a social network into a political network. And it’s got a great name.

Jx

Well that’s all over now (*phew*) and it went better than we could have imagined.

Now it’s time to don those caps of thinking and conjure up some new and wonderful things to do.

We’ve got a few ideas up our sleevies, but if you’ve got one that you’d like us to do, drop us an email at contact@egalitynow.org or leave it in the comments below.

We think we’ve got a theme though: movement. As in freedom of.

x

Talking about the Middle East:

in many ways, colonial rule has not ended. Although direct rule stopped more than half a century ago, with the exception of Iraq since 2003, indirect rule never ceased. In broad terms, the region’s regimes fall into two general categories: those who have accepted the role of client states and those who have opposed it and been punished and “contained” for stepping out of line. Then, there’s the privatisation and franchising of imperialism to multinationals.

And then on a global minimum wage:

With their massive revenue streams and the mobility to shift their assets rapidly, countless multinationals have used globalisation to hold governments to ransom and stack the global trading system unfairly in their favour by ‘outsourcing’ their operations to so-called low-cost countries while selling their output in higher-cost wealthy countries.

Related to the Tobin Tax that has been suggested for a while, the idea is that by taxing financial transactions of the city by 0.05%, $400Bn could be raised for good causes.

But here are some uncomfortable questions:

• Why only 0.05%? Why is it not 0.5%, 5% or 50%? I’m not saying which it should be, but who decides? Presumably it’s set at 0.05% because it has to be palatable to the banks? Is that how we set tax levels in the UK?
• Why split the money equally between domestic and global needs? Does the UK need the same amount to “stop cuts in public services in the UK” as the world needs to “help fight poverty and climate change”? Does that strike anyone else as absurd?
• Who will decide how it’s spent? Will it be another exercise in undemocratic G20/World Bank aid distribution? Another excuse to pump money into fancy white UN cars in poor countries?

The fact that Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are all in support of this campaign should not be a cause for joy, but just another bit of evidence that this isn’t really about changing any fundamentals.

it has creepy echos of Tony Blair wearing the white wristband.

The fact that all the main NGOs are supporting this initiative is both an example of how deep the malaise in our political system has become and that NGO action is not the answer.

Why do we have to launch a YouTube campaign to ask the banks to cede a tiny bit of cash, while we weren’t subjected to twitter stunts from the City asking us to sign a petition for their billions of bailout money?

Why would the financial centres of the world – London, New York, Tokyo – agree to any significant tax? The politicians who can implement this are not accountable to those facing starvation or climate chaos, so why should they agree to large-scale redistribution? They won’t of course. They might agree to a token amount of cash if the domestic pressure is enough, but it has to be domestic pressure. So guilt-related charity, that’s all this is. The same game as before. Don’t call it tax, call it charity.

While the short-term aims of this campaign – to raise some money for those who seriously need it – are valuable, the failure to see the bigger picture perpetuates these power imbalances.

This campaign doesn’t change the underlying dynamic of charity/NGO-led development: it’s about getting people in rich countries to lobby themselves so that they can throw a few more crumbs in the direction of people on the frontline of climate change and global poverty – a position they face often as a result of rich-country consumption and emissions.

Robin Hood? Please. It’s more like Oliver Twist.

Why can’t we learn lessons from history? We didn’t build a National Health Service or free education system based on “Alms for the Poor”. It was a stake in the political cake that changed charity into tax.

Are we ready to do this with global aid? You certainly won’t hear many NGOs calling for it. It’d put them out of a job.