Re: <nettime> EU wealth tax petition

[franz schaefer via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

2 points:

> I recently found out that there is something like EU wide petitions and one
> of those that are currently going on is asking for "a European wealth tax to
> finance the social and climate transition and help countries hit by climate
> change."

yes. it is called "ECI - european citizens' initivative" and is an official
instrument of the EU - where many people still mistake it as "yet another
online-petition". An ECI needs 1 million signiatures and needs to get over a
certain threshshold in at least 7 member states to be considerd successfull.

Then the EU commission needs to do "something" with it. So it is not binding
but at least something.

an interesting anecdote:

2 years ago there was a ECI on the topic of UBI (universal basic income). It
got around 300k signatures in the EU. In austria it got less then 4k, while
at the same time a similar initiative on the local level got 168k
signatures!. This shows that:

 - the ECI is still mistaken as "yet another online petition"
 - people still fokus on national politics instead of EU politics.

so i think it is crucial to distinguis the thing from "normal" online
petitions.


> https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

i signed it already.  but one thing that bothers me a bit is that all the
left wing initiatives still focus so much on the "redistribution" while
makeing very little afford to educate people about the madness of the
capitalist production.

as a rough guestimate: about 50% of jobs today are bullshit jobs. wasted
work in the burocracy of corporate structures but even more: creating
artifical scarcity and jobs that (just alone by their ecologic
footprint) create more harm then good. products with planed obsolescence.
advertising which has just one product: to trick us into buying things we
did not know we even need, etc...etc..

this massive inefficiency is often ignored by the left. after all even marx
describes how capitalism forces the capitalists to compete. (where he also
describes in the manifesto how overproduction leeds to the crises and the
desctruction of goods). 

redistribution would certainly help  but the volume for redistribution is
comparable small compared to the amount of money of wasted due to the
production of artificial scarcity. (give or take half of GDP each year).

so i would really like to see more focus on this issues in the campaigns of
the left. we do not just want to have a bigger peace of the pie - we want
the whole bakery. => because the way the bakery is run now it ruins our
planet.


thanks for sharing the link.


mond.


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