Oxfam Australia Media Release
Responding to the Rio de Janeiro G20 Ministerial Declaration on International Tax Cooperation published today, Oxfam International’s Tax Policy Lead Susana Ruiz, said:
“This is serious global progress – for the first time in history, the world’s largest economies have agreed to cooperate to tax the ultra-rich. Finally, the richest people are being told they can’t game the tax system or avoid paying their fair share.
“Governments have for too long been complicit in helping the ultra-rich pay little or zero tax. Massive fortunes afford the world’s ultra-rich outsized influence and power, which they wield to shield, stash and supersize their wealth, undercutting democracy and widening inequality.
“Now to the next step: at the G20 Summit in November this year, leaders need to go further than their finance ministers and back concrete coordination: agreeing on a new global standard that taxes the ultra-rich at a rate high enough to close the gap between them and the rest of us.
“Brazil has kickstarted a truly global approach to tax the ultra-rich. But the work is just beginning and international cooperation is crucial.
“We call on G20 leaders to align with the progress being made at the UN and establish a truly democratic process for setting global standards on taxing the ultra-rich. Entrusting this task to the OECD – the club of mostly rich countries – would simply not be good enough.”
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The “rich and powerful” have never had much trouble running the world or their area of interest, so, society, economies, civil services, professions, all committees, boards, departments are or can be fully controlled in areas of scheming, planning dreaming, scraping, gouging, and, money accumulation and retention. No longer do we trade pumpkins for sheep or cattle for wives, for money theorizes, abstracts, sublimates, and the herd head mentality knows that money is key to power, pussy, “progress” for the hoarder in usage. Let us bow to money and the holders, giving them our allegiance, our submission. Thus are some aims achieved, many dreams trashed, human development assaulted and defaced, as if civilisation were a cast off foreskin of no relevance to the realities of society’s civilised procreation. We little people had better get used to being sub-millimetric…
When artificial intelligence outstrips human intelligence. Predicted by some for as soon as 2029 I predict the world will be taken over by a mostly benign artificial dictatorship which, among its first autocratic acts, will be to end wars. Soon after it will begin the task of ending exploitation of the earth and after that will begin the process of redistributing the wealth.
I predict that resistance will be short lived and ultimately futile.
On the basis of its instantaneous access to all forms of (electronically stored) knowledge AI will recruit the best humans accessible to it to do those things that actually require human action.
Unfortunately my brain isn’t big enough to encompass how this will happen but I do know that I am no longer as fearful of reaching the tipping point as I would be if I were one of the multi-billionaires who have made their money through weapons development or through activities that are destroying the planet.
Notwithstanding the Rio Declaration on tax collection, I’ll bet London to a brick that the filthy rich will double down on parking their assets in hidden accounts, offshore havens, squirrelled away out of sight, out of reach, an army of lawyers and accountants paid to disguise, hide, fudge, obfuscate, lie, a middle finger raised in stinking defiance of any attempt to rein in their inordinate inequality and a gesture of contempt for the rest of the populace who struggle just to get by, the 9 to 5 treadmill of deadening mechanistic drudgery just to get a lousy pay packet at the end of each week… it’s a rotten way to live as I’m often reminded when I see middle-aged folk sweeping floors, clearing tables with the glazed look of beaten dogs about them, befuddled by how life can be reduced to such a menial and trivial existence in a world where the rich are glamourised, red-carpeted, feted by the Murdochs at black-tie dinners and featured on all the social pages. So rotten, unfair, so much inequality for common humanity.
Can you imagine a Bezos, a Musk, a Branson, an Adani or Ambani, a Pratt or a Rinehart ever agreeing to the legislative determinations of little people telling them what they must now do, viz, hand over 90% of their wealth to a central revenue account?
Riiiight! Was that a skien of pigs flying into the sunset?
Skein,fuck me,and I thought I was infallible.
The government controls democracy, or does it really? It just tries to distribute what it can get, whilst democracy is forever assailed by oligarchs, it remains a numbers game. The oligarchs control real estate, money, guns and drugs, any desperadoes they want to hire, and make rules by the innumerable ways and means at their disposal.
Perhaps the only balance is via head count. The vast predominance of ordinary folk avail themselves of an ever increasing volume of artisan smartness, and also strongarm pitchfork wielders. Whereas the diminutive concentration of oligarchs tend to breed progeny of indolent feckless incompetent self-entitled fops – now thinly spread across the world squealing like stuck pigs bloated and strangulated by their own greed, beguiled, confused and outstripped by their own culture of inchoate trumpery.
The word is out.
Pigs may not fly, but in their sieges, as they cannibalise they’re a cert to become flyblown.