Via CFIF:
In July, Inter Presse news service reported that a top U.N. official was preparing a new study that will outline numerous global tax proposals to be considered by the General Assembly at its September meeting. The proposals will likely include everything from global taxes on e-mails and Internet use to a global gas tax and levies on airline travel. If adopted, American taxpayers could wind up paying hundreds of billions of dollars each year to the United Nations.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is among those leading the charge, having stated that he “strongly supports finding new sources of funding” for the U.N. through global taxes, according to Inter Presse. In fact, Annan made very clear his support for the imposition of global taxes in a 2001 Technical Note that he authored for a U.N. conference. “The need to finance the provision of global public goods in an increasingly globalized world also adds new urgency to the need for innovative new sources of financing,” Annan wrote [emphases mine]
Translation: “All your sovereignty is belong to us.”
Reached for comment, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards noted that “the growing interconnectedness of the world economy calls for a progressive, global economic vision ,” then mumbled something about “pretty pretty kitties” before excusing himself “to go and comb my chocolate locks.”
(h/t mass Backwards; more here, and here)
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update: “A reminder from your friends at the UN. This post will be 7¢. Please help keep Lebanon clean!”
Alternate headline:
Kofi, Plea, (f)or Bilk
I’m here all week, enjoy the buffet…
So how is this any different from what we have now?
The US already subsidizes the UN, hell the main building was bought and paid for by US tax dollars.
Just when you thought the UN couldn’t get any more arrogant and useless at the same time, there they go.
Maybe I should be worried about the UN’s version of the IRS, since they have such effective law enforcement operational capabilities.
Oh wait………never mind…
They can make me pay taxes to the UN when the Sun has an Ice Age, and not a moment sooner.
I used to collect for UNICEF and then pocket the swag.
I may just have to start doing that again.
Maybe I’m just rambling here, but I seem to remember something about taxation without representation being tyranny.
I seem to remember something about that.
I don’t think it turned out all that well for the tax-ors. The results were pretty good for the tax-ees, though. Maybe we should ask them to bring it on.
Oh geez, that kitties and choco-locks bit was fucking funny.
“I used to collect for UNICEF and then pocket the swag.”
So you’re the one you gave the UN its idea for how to run the Oil-for-Terror, er, Food program, huh?
Whenever I hear mention of an email tax, my hoax alarm goes off. Is there a primary source for any of this, or at least a news story?
Nothing on the CFIF site that I can find. I’ve emailed them with a request for a link to the primary source.
CFIF responds:
Dear Jeff,
We do not have a link to the InterPresse article, but I have provided a copy for you (below) from Lexis-Nexis.
Copyright 2004 IPS-Inter Press Service/Global Information Network
IPS-Inter Press Service
July 8, 2004, Thursday
LENGTH: 1343 words
HEADLINE: DEVELOPMENT: U.N. TO ASK GLOBAL TAXES DESPITE BIG-POWER OPPOSITION
BYLINE: By Thalif Deen
DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS, Jul. 8, 2004
BODY:
Despite strong reservations by the United States, Japan and Germany, proposed new global taxes will take centre-stage at the United Nations this year.
A longstanding controversy exists over the taxes as a new sources of funding for the world’s poorer nations.
“The debate has already entered the United Nations,” says U.N. Under-Secretary-General Jose Antonio Ocampo, head of the department of economic and social affairs (DESA). “We have been requested to prepare a study, the results of which will be presented to the General Assembly in September this year,” he told IPS.
The proposals on the table include a carbon tax on fuel use, the ‘Tobin tax’ on currency transactions, a levy on international sales of weapons, a global lottery and a tax on international airline travel.
“Although some key countries are very strongly opposed to these proposed global taxes,” Ocampo said, “a number of developed and developing countries for example France and Brazil are giving them careful consideration.”
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that unless current development assistance is doubled to $ 100 billion annually, the world’s 132 developing nations will fail to meet their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
These goals are aimed at reducing poverty, improving education and health care, eliminating diseases, and preventing environmental degradation—all by the 2015 deadline set by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000.
“We need action. There is an urgent need for a critical mass of new resources to deal with a wide spectrum of human hardship,” says Annan, who strongly supports finding new sources of funding.
“One of the most innovative ideas,” he told the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Brazil in June, “is an International Financing Facility (IFF) proposed by the United Kingdom, that would ‘frontload’ aid to meet the MDGs.”
But the proposal for an IFF has split the 25-member European Union. EU Commissioner Poul Nielson says “a sleight of hand with the rules of public finance—that mortgages future aid programmes—is no substitute for the hard political task of securing and sustaining the will to provide increased aid, now and for many years to come.”
“This leads me to say that the IFF is really not the right way to go. Fighting global poverty is not something we should leave to be paid for by our children and grandchildren,” Nielson told UNCTAD delegates.
He added that international taxation offers one approach that would promise lasting resources for development, although the European Commission has not taken a view on specific proposals. But he warned that “all of the proposals for global taxes have their problems.”
“Given the parlous state of many of the least developed countries (LDCs), it is clear that something needs to be done to raise money to help them out of their continuing and deepening financial crisis,” says Daphne Davies of the Brussels-based LDC Watch, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that monitors the world’s 50 poorest nations.
“There have been several proposals for global taxes, many of which fail because they are vague and difficult to implement,” Davies told IPS. “However, two could be particularly targeted for use within Least Developed Countries: an environment tax—based on the ‘polluter pays’ principle—and a global tax on arms sales,” she said.
Many LDCs, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are fabulously rich in mineral wealth, Davies added. But most Africans do not benefit from that wealth, much of which goes to multinational corporations, and, as well, extracting the minerals is a major despoiler of the environment.
Most LDC governments, she argued, are in a weak position to set conditions on how such activities are carried out, particularly by foreign companies. Some LDCs have also experienced vast corruption by their own government leaders, who have appropriated revenues earned from resource extraction.
To overcome all these problems, Davies said, NGOs from LDCs have suggested a ‘polluter pays’ clause for extracting natural resources. A mechanism could be set up, under the auspices of the United Nations, and overseen by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), she suggested.
Companies that extract resources would pay a percentage of the value of the wealth they earn into a fund, whose money would then be used to improve or to restore the environment in LDCs, Davies added.
She said that Brazilian President Lula da Silva last year suggested a tax on arms sales. “This type of tax would help LDCs, as civil wars and conflicts are some of the greatest causes of poverty and underdevelopment in LDCs,” according to Davies.
The majority of these conflicts, she said, have taken place in sub-Saharan African LDCs. It was calculated that in 1999 the region spent 4.4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence spending—the highest rate in the world—compared with 3.1 percent by the United States, 2.3 percent by Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and 3.2 percent by non-NATO Europe.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the worldwide value of weapons deliveries is about $ 32.6 billion annually. The richest developed nations and the world’s major powers—including the United States, Russia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom—account for more than 85 percent of arms sales.
“Perhaps the reason why western nations are not in favour of the tax idea is because it would, (a) highlight the role they play in producing and selling arms to LDCs, and ( b) force them to pay tax on arms sales,” Davies added.
If just one percent of arms sales were paid each year into a global fund administered by the United Nations, it would raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Part of that money could then be used for post-conflict rehabilitation and government building in LDCs, according to this idea.
Ruby van der Wekken of the Helsinki-based Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD) said that today the proposal for a tax on currency transactions (CTT) is by far the most viable suggestion of all global tax initiatives. The dual effect of this tax (decrease in speculation and more resources for democratically decided “good issues”) makes it very appealing, she said.
The effort to set up the tax system would be a small price to pay to fend off the huge economic and human costs of global financial meltdown and instability, van der Wekken suggested, adding that slackening global conditions are at least partially due to the re-emergence of global financial markets.
“Once the currency transactions tax, including a democratic system of the redistribution of the income is implemented, other forms of global taxation could easily be set up,” she told IPS.
“Although the currency transactions tax may not be realised tomorrow, we hope that we will not need another severe currency crisis before the proposal gains stronger wind under its wings,” she added.
During the first months of 2004, including at the June UNCTAD meeting, Lula da Silva has repeatedly suggested the need for a tax on speculative financial transactions, especially those conducted in international “tax havens”.
The governments of France and Chile have apparently decided to support the initiative, van der Wekken said.
Asked why countries like the United States oppose it, she said both the United States and Britain rely on income that financial speculators send to London and New York.
Also, as many research reports show, the beneficiaries of currency crises are often western investors and lenders, she added.
Van der Wekken warned that while it may appear to decision-makers that the U.S. dollar is difficult to speculate against, while currencies of other countries—or smaller currency zones—are easier targets, “we however think this is a mistake, for the U.S. dollar may also collapse.”
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This whole thing makes me kind of puke a little in my mouth.
Those who think that “progresssive income taxes” are a good thing are about to learn what that means on a global scale.
Of course, that presupposes this actually goes through, which I have a very hard time imagining.
The best part:
“Many LDCs, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are fabulously rich in mineral wealth, Davies added. But most Africans do not benefit from that wealth, much of which goes to multinational corporations, and, as well, extracting the minerals is a major despoiler of the environment.”
Yeah, all that wealth is going to MNCs. That’s why Congolese dictators all become mutli-billionaires. How do so many people fail to recognize a simple, straightforward con act when they see it? It reminds me of Matchstick Men, where the con artist argues that he never stole anything–people always give him their money freely.
Perhaps Kofi Annan is unfamiliar with the phrase, “No taxation without representation.” We fought a war over this once against the dominant power in the world at the time. Somehow I think Turtle Bay will be a little easier to deal with.
Thanks for the article, Jeff (and CFIF). I should point out that while there is mention of taxes on weapons sales, mineral extraction, and even international air travel, the tax on email seems to have been a CFIF embellishment. It’d be best not to jump on it with both feet.
I do find it a bit ominous that the UN is trying to convert itself from an intergovernmental discussion club to a de facto governing body, with the ability to raise taxes. (With the support of France, natch. Which seems odd, given that it’s knee-deep in both the business of extracting resources from third-world hellholes, and in the complementary business of supplying weapons for their various and sundry conflicts.)
The UN must really want us to withdraw our membership. Must be because they lost all that Oil for Palaces money.
We’re probably not going to be asked to keep Lebanon clean. The Assad family has been cleaning the place out pretty good on its own.
So the UN, as the one-world, one-government utopians, have decided they know how to fix all the dysfunctional LDC governments, with such recommendations as socialism as the governing political principle, and welfare transfer payments (from 1st world countries) as the foreign relations principle. There was no mention of efforts to increase jobs, commerce, industry, or trade–except to raise taxes on the activity, when mentioned.
Notice that, other than conference host Brazil’s Lulu, not one elected public official was quoted anywhere. Can you say NGOs looking for their gravytrain?
The late Peter Lord Bauer broke ground with the concept of “Trade, not aid” as the key to 3rd world development over 40 years ago, and still these UN ninnies don’t know any better.
Orwell must be rolling over in his grave, with such concepts, as:
“a democratic system of the redistribution of the income…â€Â
“…more resources for democratically decided “good issues”
Some frightening concepts
I have got to get some more guns.