What Adbusters want – we all need!

Adbusters has put forward a list of wants/demands and I like them. I think they deserve consideration and I shall do so from inside the idea of Global DemoKratia and the Flow Siphon Flat Payment which I have been advocating for some time.

A 1% tax on all financial flows

 

1% is a bit excessive. At such a level all speculative trade will cease or move to another market, essentially going underground and away from any control or understanding. Financial market power will not diminish but our power to control it will. Speculative trading is gambling on a massive scale it will continue no matter what is done to control it so we should benefit from this activity rather than quash it. This is why I advocate a smaller 0.5% to 0.05% tax or siphon of financial transactions and combine this with a flat payment to all adults. This effectively trickles money out of the financial markets into real markets where people can use it.

 

Total transparency in government affairs

Wikileaks has com acropper trying to “encourage” transparency because a politician’s job like that of the courtiers of old is the keeping and selective spreading of secrets. That is how a courtier gets and maintains power. They will never agree to be open, and will fight every attempt to share information immediately, truthfully and openly. The suppression, delaying and editing of documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act is testament to the hatred politicians have for telling their people what they are really doing.

 

They will trot out national security as an excuse, but what they mean by this is the government’s security, for the government is the state. They will also trot out police matters, whereby the offender may escape if the public knows what they know. With true freedom of information where is a truly bad person going to escape to? Wherever they go people will tell, and then we can all judge whether the accused really presents a threat to our freedom or just a threat to the powerful.

The how to is easy, Wikileaks has shown the way in this and we all have access to information technology. All we fear is our loss of income and status, basically our job. A flat payment helps give us freedom to spread the truth because it guarantees us an income and this financial survival. Of course they may still come after us with guns. In a global DemoKratia one of the two functions the central body will have is to ensure no person can take another life. You will have defenders and your attackers will know this. You may be tortured though. Whether you are protected or the ones you blabbed on are protected will depend upon the choice others make, fortunately or unfortunately you will be judged by your peers. (I admit this requires more contemplation. Is it better to be judged by God, a wise person, or the masses? I dare say I don’t wish to be judged by our current mass which has been so influenced and manipulated by vested interests)

A true cost global market

Now this will give the numerous accountants something meaningful to do. It is not easy to do full product costing with all externalities included. We have a lot of accountants and professors in econometrics so let’s finally put them to good use.  The price you must pay will be the full cost and the slab of money over and above tangible costs and fair profit for a products damage to our sustainability and humanity can be put away for future use, or used to clean up the damaged caused.

 

So general hardship doesn’t occur in the early years the true cost could be indicative, advertised next to the price. This is so the poor who still need water, electricity transport to work everyday can survive. They won’t be able to pay the true cost of running their car, or heating their house with carbon based fuels. They can’t afford another option either.

 

We are going some way toward achieving true global costs carbon taxes have put one externality on the profit and loss statement. This is a very good thing and could be used for other environmental and social costs. Imagine an unsafe work environment tax and payment system, or city congestion tax and payment system (many cities have a congestion levy but the tax is pooled into council coffers for mayors to abuse). It is imperative that any taxes go back to those that must purchase the products so individuals can make the market work for our longevity, without undue influence. Such as advertising which leads into the next demand.

 

You will see that there are to ideas here, one is the pooling of the excess money for future clean up costs the other is its redistribution to drive thoughtful sustainable markets. This falls into the current dichotomy that is splitting our world. Central control or individual control? With an enlightened populous individual control is always preferable, if not enlightened and thoughtful we are basically doomed to hope a good person gets in power and stays good. So we must make all effort to encourage an intelligent thoughtful and caring populous.

Less corporate influence in our lives

How to stop them manipulating us? It would be trite to say we can just resist. Corporations pay millions to psychologists who figure out how we can be tricked into consuming without even realising. As we go about our daily business they will get in our way and into our heads and their sole purpose is to move our money, our power, our value votes, into their hands. We cannot just resist.

So what to do? Firstly we can encourage more small and medium sized businesses, actually meeting your supplier is a good way to cut through the crap. Although people now spend a lot of time perception managing themself, which is a personal form of marketing manipulation or what used to be called dishonesty, we are actually pretty good at picking the disingenuous  from the decent when we meet face to face. So encouraging small to medium sized businesses is a step in the right direction, this can be encouraged by a flat payment and our own custom.

But what of advertising, as you may have noticed I have advertising on this site in an attempt to move some money from them to me, but in the process you are duped, this is not a good situation. I rely on advertising for income for the site, if I had another source of income like a flat payment the advertising goes, because I have no need for it and it distracts from the content. So a regular payment will encourage small information providers to eliminate advertising manipulation. This severs the blood supply to the corporation.

Hopefully these small changes combined with the knowledge corporations are lying to us to separate us from our money should decrease their influence in a slow manageable way.

We could also take away their separate legal entity status and make the owners responsible for their CEO’s actions. That aught a help too!

 

A grand international strategy for dealing with global warming

 

Something grand! We so need it. We need something we can work together on and be proud of. We need something greater than the day to day survival and wanting for happiness we have been sold is the only purpose of our finite life. And what better grand project than building a sustainable future for us all while  undoing the damage our forbears have done providing such an inhabitable planet.

 

What this grand strategy will be I won’t speculate on now, for it is so much fun to create grand things that we should all spend some time pondering the strategy and even implementing and testing our own. I have this grand plan to grow food in the arid Australian outback and a new invention that collects water from the air is just the thing that makes it possible. But we need an overall strategy one we can all feel we own but is implemented on a global scale. Participating in its fruition will bind us and give us a true higher purpose, something that is truly lacking in our consumerist “Just do it “ society. Who will implement such a strategy? I dare say we need a true leader, a benevolent caring one and from a more caring society one should emerge.

 

David J Campbell