Global public goods for global redistribution

At the far end of campus, in an elusive NAEA auditorium, I listened carefully to a staff member from the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens (Attac). His message was this: the path to global stability and equality is via the taxation of international financial capital and the spending of that money on internationalized health care and poverty relief. He cited that over the last 30 years, the world has seen a 10% shift in income distribution from labor to capital.

The Attac plan involves using the UN (in his opinion, the only legitemate organization) to provide oversight, and the IMF and World Bank to monitor and administer taxation of the transactions. The Attac representative charged forward, proclaiming that now, while the banks of developed countries are on their knees, is the time to push for this radical reformation.

It makes sense to me that free market policies have widened income distributions. And, I greatly appreciate Attac's message of equity and humanity. There is no reason that 25,000 people should die every day from starvation, while some live in $1m+ homes. But the question and answer session yielded some disappointing responses regarding details of the proposal.

When one woman asked how a powerless UN General Assembly and a power dominating Security Council could ever implement such a proposal, the response was that we need to reorder power relationships from the ground up (i.e. this years 100,000 WSF attendees should turn to a future 1m attendees, and so on). This was disappointing from a practical standpoint. Global poverty statistics are fairly widely known. I just kept thinking that everyone sees so many of those "Give $1 a day!" commercials, that at this point I feel like the impact of spreading that knowledge has its limits. Even if the knowledge and the forum can create that kind of awareness and consciousness, can that be done in the timeframe the Attac thinks is crucial?

I also see difficulties with reforming the IMF and World Bank, two semi-autonomous organizations, overnight. Historically, the fund and the bank have represented US interests: the Bretton Woods conference in many ways favored the US model for organizational structuring and the US used the fund to pursue geopolitical goals during the cold war (Ngaire Woods, Globalizers). When I brought this question to the table, the speaker mostly reiterated that it will take a long process of reordering of public opinion. How soon will it be that US voters will be willing to demand what politicians are sure to call a tax increase for everyone, even if it means providing for the disadvantaged?

The future for this cause looks grim, but I think that's where our responsibility starts. Not only should we be ensuring the basic needs like health care and education for global citizens, but a tax on international capital flows would discourage speculative investment, stabilizing developing economies. Like most problems discussed at the forum, the solution requires promoting fundamental values of democracy and equity, which somehow got lost in the shift to neo-liberalism. So, while I'm saddened by the apparent distance of the picture Attac paints for the world, I'm also excited both that the forum is a place for this kind of brainstorming and for the day when this possibility might be a reality.