Can we please get serious about taxing the rich? Polls show that hefty majorities of people in the United States — and around the world — believe the rich ought to be paying more at tax time. Yet our contemporary don’t-tax-the-rich era has now entered its fifth consecutive decade.
Egalitarian tax policy, you could say, has hit a rough patch.
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The world is currently at an ebb for realizing the Right to Development (RtD). Weakening of multilateralism, de-globalization, the scars left by the COVID-19 pandemic, misinterpretation and dilution of the RtD, and inertia to reform international governance are among the multitude of reasons for this phenomenon. However, the need for a better, more inclusive and greener recovery, and the efforts necessary to attain the 2030 Agenda, have provided the international community an opportunity to reinvigorate the realization of the RtD. These efforts have shown the great relevance of RtD to promote a people-centred and fairer development process and the need for an international enabling environment in order to promote the kind of development we want.
Read South Center’s new paper
One major reason for the highly uneven global economic recovery is the huge variation in fiscal responses between rich countries and the rest of the world. An annual issuance of special drawing rights, the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset, could help to bring about a more equitable and climate-friendly rebound.
Read the article by Jayathi Ghosh
| In time for the International Women’s Day, women across the world reaffirm that they are a powerful force to be reckoned with as they collectively fight against oppression and break down systemic and structural barriers.In the face of the pandemic, women in all their diversity – in the unions and factories, in farms and indigenous communities, in urban poor centers in structured organizations or informal movements – continued to mobilize and put themselves at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, and the struggle against the deepening political and socio-economic crises inherent to a patriarchal, colonial, racist and imperialist system. Thus, on this International Women’s day, we celebrate the billions of women who continue to raise our voices, strike down barriers, and call for collective action and solidarity. Now more than ever, we reaffirm that if women stop, the world stops! |
The report makes it clear that some thresholds to take action have been passed, leading to irreversible losses and damage, and that this decade is the only window of opportunity to act and that waiting for technological fixes to be invented to “catch up” is not a solution.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as an “atlas of human suffering”. He added: “The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”
Continue readingby Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Ukraine’s sovereignty cannot be questioned. The invasion of Ukraine is illegal and must be condemned. The mobilization of civilians ordered by the Ukrainian president can be read as a desperate act, but it does suggest that a guerrilla war looms in the future. Putin should remember the experience of the US in Vietnam: no matter how powerful, an invader’s regular army will ultimately meet with defeat if the people being invaded rise in arms against it. All this makes us antecipate an incalculable loss of innocent human life. Still barely recovered from the pandemic, Europe is bracing itself for a new challenge, one of unfathomable proportions. In the face of all this, one’s perplexity could not be greater.
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What is the foundation of social citizenship in the twenty-first century? An empirical reading of popular discourse would suggest it is the oft-repeated dogma of multistakeholderism (MSism). What is MSism, and what does it have to do with Big Tech capitalism?
In the mainstream digital discourse, the idea of ‘stake’ goes back to the successful model on which the internet was built and managed in the early days by governments, the private sector, the technical and academic community, and civil society. Proponents of MSism believe that a whole range of issues confronting modern polity can be solved without the conventional rigmarole of democracy, through a process based on an ‘interest’ in the domain to which the governance apparatus is being applied. Interest-based stakes comprise a simplistic, apolitical device of ensuring an outcome consistent with one’s values (professional, technical, or financial). They shift the compass from citizenship in the community of the governed – rooted in a political-normative consensus about civic-public interest – to a post-democratic notion of voice and participation.
Read the article by Anita Gurumurthy
The renewal groups of the World Social Forum, in their preparatory work for the WSF Mexico 2022, note with dismay the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
We strongly oppose the use of force to resolve geopolitical and economic-financial conflicts. Without denying the reality of these conflicts, we note that armed force never benefits citizens but, on the contrary, causes them great suffering.
We call on all parties to return to the path of diplomacy and negotiation as the only way for all to live in peace and to address the real problems, such as poverty, inequality, pandemics and the climate crisis.
We call for the solidarity of all peoples to achieve global de-escalation and disarmament.
Group for the Renewal of the World Social Forum, Mexico
‘For a New World Social Forum’, international Renewal group (https://foranewwsf.org )
by Mary Kaldor
“It is not evident that the sanctions under discussion—such as on the SWIFT mechanism for financial transfers, excluding Russia from the dollar-led banking system—will help. In most other cases, such as Venezuela, Iran or Syria, such sanctions have tended to hurt ordinary people more than elites and provide a convenient scapegoat for the regime.
What is missing so far from western responses is an emphasis on human rights. If aggressive behaviour abroad is linked to repressive and predatory behaviour at home, then human rights must be central.
Russia is affiliated to the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose members are committed to observance of human rights. These organisation should be given a much more prominent role in the discussions around the crisis.”
Reflections on the illness of societies, on the origins of the anti-vax movement and on possible futures…
Uniting society post-pandemic? | Wall Street International Magazine (wsimag.com)
Article by Francine Mestrum
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