MEDIA NEW ZEALAND
Robin Hood tax Wanganui Chronicle
22/6/10
Heather Marion Smith
Just a coincidence, or was the release of Russell Crowe's Robin Hood movie a timely reminder of what Nobel Prize economist James Tobin was advocating over 40 years ago? Popularly called a "Robin Hood tax", his proposal was for a fiscal mechanism to calm the volatility of the money markets, what he called an "automatic stabiliser", i.e. a small levy on international financial transactions, which largely escape taxation. The result would be a move from corporate casino capitalism to productive people's capitalism with a healthy democratically decided
balance between small‐to‐medium business and government ownership of our resources. Earlier this year shareholders in Sandford's fishing company were told: "A tax on non‐trade‐related currency transactions could not only earn significant income for the Government, it could result in our exchange rate moving closer to its realistic value and thereby add significant value to the wealth of New Zealanders!" So we social creditors have been aiming our arrows straight for nearly three decades, in the face of ridicule from our detractors. Now hundreds of European politicians,
Otago Daily Times 7/10/10 Labour leader Phil Goff s latest attempt to appease his constituents by promoting the removal of GST from fresh fruit and vegetables is nothing short of pathetic. If Mr Goff is serious about wanting to reduce the cost of living for all New Zealanders, he should be promoting the total abolishment of GST in favour of a financial transfer Bob Warrren tax (FTT). This tax is simple, easily understood, administered by the press of a key and, as its name suggests, collects tax from every financial transfer, through the banking system. A FTT takes a small percentage from every dollar that goes out of any account. No account escapes.
including ex‐Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are rushing to promote some kind of "Robin Hood" tax, as supported by the writer of the "... bankers must pay for recklessness" article in Saturday's Chronicle. What say our local MPs? Heather Marion Smith, Democrats for Social Credit, Wanganui (See 'The Robin Hood Tax' on Media World page)
All transactions in a currency are subject to the tax, with no compliance costs, no exemptions, no bureaucracy or fraud investigations, no havens or loopholes. FTT is truly broad based and low rate, and so efficient that nearly all of the revenue collected is available for Government needs. Social Credit recognises that money, originally invented to facilitate trade, is now almost entirely employed in speculation, an activity that notoriously frequently escapes the tax net. It is time to rethink the tax system, not tinker with it or patch it. Bob Warren Chairman, Southern Region Democrats for Social Credit (See 'A tax system for the new millennium: FTT' by John Pemberton in the previous Guardian Political Review issue 58).
The disappearing family farm The Disappearing Family Farm Farmers today are not the gumbooted, Swanndri‐clad sons of the soil that Fed Farmers and their spin merchants would like to portray to you. The new operators are money men, adept at playing the futures on the commodity exchange. Their soft hands are more used to caressing their Blackberries. Live stock are production units; grass, fertiliser and water are inputs. Human resources hires and fires the workforce. The bottom line for investing in farming is how cheap the land is, how much water is available, how many kilograms of dry matter per hectare it will produce, and how many cubic metres of effluent the environment can stand before it collapses. John Gardner And there is some serious money to be made, and production at all costs is the game. Cows that became numbers, and now are just barcodes. Animal husbandry has been replaced by asset management. Sovereign wealth funds and multinational corporations are investing heavily in those parts of the world that will not be affected by climate change. Land is being bought in New Zealand in order to secure water rights and to develop large‐scale food production. In the future, who knows what our primary sector will look like? If you want your grandchildren to have a memory of what the family farm looked like before agri‐industry took over, take the opportunity to show them now, before the family farm disappears completely. John Gardner, The Nelson Mail (extract) 7/4/10 • John Gardner works as a senior adviser on border health protection for the Ministry of Health. (Item supplied by Adrian Bayly)
Tenants in our own land? Sorry John, we're that already By Finlay Macdonald Sunday Star‐Times 1.8.10 (extract) When John Key first said he'd "hate to see New Zealanders as tenants in Finlay Macdonald their own country" I was mildly shocked. A former master of the money universe and free‐trade cheerleader expressing such a parochial, nationalistic, economically incorrect sentiment ‐ could I believe my ears? The whole notion is so loaded, so resonant with feudal implications, only a politician so cheerfully bland as Key could utter it without sounding like a populist Guardian Political Review, Issue 59 - Page 13
demagogue. Even someone whose personal fortune derives from the borderless flow of hot money in an unfettered global casino economy can appreciate that selling the ground out from underneath your own feet may be a gamble too far. As a nation we sold many of our most valuable strategic assets some time ago, handing ownership over to local and foreign elites with a pro forma rubber stamp from the Overseas Investment Commission, making us the equivalent of sharecroppers
or crofters in what was once our own land. Our puny currency is afloat on a speculative ocean that sees it traded at absurd levels ‐ mostly while we sleep, proving how little influence we have over our own fortunes ‐ in large part due to a monetary policy that keeps interest and exchange rates high, pumps billions of dollars of credit into housing bubbles and personal debt, and generally facilitates a culture of renting our lifestyles off others. We're renting the present off the future and hoping the bailiff never comes knocking.