Portside

New paper makes the case that a global billionaire tax is ethical, good for growth, and could solve a lot of the world’s problems. Oh and politically viable.

While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

The efforts to flout voter-approved laws are part of ongoing conservative and corporate-backed strategies to keep wages low.

The United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was supposed to establish guidelines for sustainable development. At the Summit, then Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a speech (short), warning of the dire consequences of failing to reverse course. Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civilization through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims. Speech reprinted below.

The response to growing economic inequality must start with mass resistance within every country and maximum solidarity among all workers and peasants, in rich and poor countries alike. The details of such struggles have to be worked out in each place. The key is solidarity among all workers and peasants, within and between the states of the world.

The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

A system based on the fair distribution of use values, decent work, and production and consumption levels that remain within nature’s biophysical limits cannot occur without the abandonment of a social order based on profit and accumulation.