INVITATION WORLD PUBLIC FINANCES

(last updated 30 August 2006)

At World Social Forum 2005 in Porto Alegre, a group of organizations and movements working around financial system issues formed a platform called “Otro Sistema Financeiro”. The involved organizations were a variety of actors, such as Attac groups from Brazil, Finland, France, Italy and Japan, the Tax Justice Network, NIGD, Unifasco and others. In the fall of 2005, the scope has been enlargened and is now also reaching out to debt movements and organizations. The title has been adopted accordingly, now the heading is World Public Finances (WPF).

A start off for WPF was made at the polycentric WSF 2006 in Bamako, where organizations gathered around the proposal of presenting collectively a practical-political proposal for a new basis of an international system of Public Finances, in a process of articulation between involved actors from the WSF in Bamako, to the WSF 2007 in Nairobi.

Please see the following WPF related material and links:
The Outline of the initiative in the below
WPF Concept Paper
WPF blog

Please sign up to the WPF mailing list (see below) in order to be part of the new platform and work together with us.

Do join us, and do not hesitate to pass this message on to others who might be interested in learning of this initiative.

with kind regards,
Yoko Akimoto (ATTAC Japan)
Matti Kohonen (Tax Justice Network)
Antonio Martins (Liberdade Brasil)
Mika Rönkkö (ATTAC Finland)
Ruby van der Wekken (NIGD)

Outline For World Public Finances

I. What is World Public Fincances?

World Public Finance is an open network of movements and organizations which try to mobilize societies and propose alternatives on the themes of debt, CTT, control of capital flows, tax havens, money and profit laudering, international taxation, citizen control of public budgets and other related.

II. Which are its goals?

+ To promote inter-communication among all these organizations and moviments, in order to stimulate common comprehension of their themes, to share information on their campaigns and agenda

+ To stimulate common actions

+ To promote research on existent systems of money, credit and taxes, their effects and the alternatives to them

+ To promote research on how to create a system of World Public Finance, turned to international redistribution of wealth and involving money, credit and taxation.

III. Some themes of research

+ How to build a democratic and redistributive system of international taxes

+ How to deal with the fiscal heavens challenge, and to avoid then frustrating the efforts for a system of international taxes

+ How to build an international monetary system alternative to the dollar dictatorship

+ How to create an international financial system turned to promotion of equality and sustainable development

+ Is it possible to implement an international income of citezenship?

IV. Africa, laboratory for WPF

+ As a first task, that would occupy us for the next months, we could try to debate which international redistributive policies would capable of stopping and inverting rapping of African wealth. These policies could be an anternative to "international aid" or charitative proposals, as Millenium Goals and Tony Blair`s initiative

+ The redistribution could have, as goals, themes that are frequently debated in WSF and cannot to be achieved by market mechanisms. Por instance, to stop the pandemic of AIDS in Africa, to assure the access of all is inhabitants to clean water, to stimulate in a consistent basis peasant agriculture, to provide financing of infrastructure projects without conditionalities, to expand public libraries.

+ WPF could propose itself to study the costs of these initiatives, the mechanisms of wealth distribution necessary to finance them, and the democratic administration of the ressources.

V. Work program

+ To write a text proposing the concept of WPF

+ To create a website with triple goal
a. to stablish communication between campaings, organizations and moviments which deal with theses themes, possibly using RSS
b. to build a basic library of texts
c. to spread the idea of Wolrd Public Finance

+ To write the guidelines of a plan of work, turned to fundraising

+ To establish a secretary, possibly close to NIGD, in Finland.

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Participate in the initiative!
A new email list has been created for the participants in the World Public Finances-Initiative.
The email address of the list is wpf@sympa.kaapeli.fi.

Subscribe to the list via the webpage
http://sympa.kaapeli.fi/sympa/info/wpf. There you can also do your list settings and browse the list archive!
And spread the word about this new list and its web address to other persons and organisations who may want to participate!

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