The come-back of the Currency Transaction Tax

NIGD News and Notes November-December 2004

In this issue:
1. The come-back of the CTT
2. ...and why should the North care about the South?
3. World Social Forum V in preparation
4. NIGD November/December month events
5. A conference call on Civil Society Visions and Strategies

1. Update on the campaign for a Currency Transaction Tax

The come-back of the CTT
by Mikael Böök
During 2004 the idea of a global taxation has made a come-back. The currency transactions tax (CTT) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of feasible global or international taxes.


2. Reports/Publications

New finance mechanisms for international cooperation
by Marko Ulvila and Katarina Sehm-Patomäki
In January 2004, in Geneva, the Presidents of Brazil, France, Chile, together with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, started an action program aimed at identifying innovative sources of financing. A technical group was set up to explore new sources of finance, such as taxation on certain sales of arms, taxes on financial transactions, voluntary and socially responsible investments and environmental taxation. In Helsinki, the Finnish Parliament group for Global Issues and NIGD invited to a dialogue on this initiative.

Hope and Struggle after November 3rd 2004
by Thomas Wallgren
Following the US elections, Thomas Wallgren issued a statement on the future the role of the EU.

Why should we bother about ‘the Rest’?
by Hanna Laako
Whatever the exact meaning of Finnish member of European Parliament Alexander Stubb’s ‘globalisation idealism’, this column published by the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA is to argue that not only Finns, but also Europeans, should be more - not less - preoccupied with questions related to globalisation and critically reconsider the knowledge, especially in Political Science, that we hold about outside Europe and the United States.

Norwegian Social Forum
by Thomas Ponniah
The essence of the achievement of this years' Norwegian Social Forum was that it expressed a politics that combined short-term electoral tactics with long-term social movement strategies. The NSF outlined the direction that forthcoming local, regional and national forums should take.

European and New York social forums
by Petri Minkkinen
Petri Minkkinen reports from a personal point of view on his experiences from the recent European and New York social forums.


3. World Social Forum V in preparation
by Ruby van der Wekken from the WSF webpages

2560 events for WSF V
More than 60.000 individuals have already registered for WSF V. The event registrations for WSF fifth edition was closed on November 25. 2560 events have been registered by 4.071 organizations from 112 countries and they have been registered according to the 11 main WSF themes that were the result of a consulation process. Till the 5th of December it was still possible to aggregate and interlink events according to the new metholodogy of the forum. 11 Facilitating Groups have been installed to accompany the agglutinating process.Dates and schedule for proposed events are hoped to be known by mid-december. Read more on this and the methodology of the forum

100% self-organized
The main decision of the meeting of the Forum’s International Council Methodology and Contents Commissions from November 13 to 15, in Porto Alegre was to intensify the participative character of the WSF: for the first time in its five editions the meeting will be completely self-organized. This means that Brazilian Organizing Committee (BOC) won´t hold any round table. All discussions are to be proposed and organized by entities that register for WSF. Until this year, the greatest self-organization experience had happened in India - where the Indian Organizing Committee (IOC) held only 13 out of the 1.182 events.

Still Porto Alegre
Read the words of the WSF Organizing Committee and the Brazilian Organising Committee on the holding of the WSF in Porto Alegre, despite the fact that the PT Labour Party lost governance of the city in the last round of local elections.

Education and Water
Education and water are the priorities indicated by participants of the IV WSF in India in the construction of “another world”. This is one of the results of a survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE), under the direction of the International Secretariat of the Forum. The survey was carried out during the fourth edition of the Forum, at Mumbai in India, at the beginning of this year.

Marocco 2006?
A Committee of the Social Forum of Marocco has handed in a proposal to hold the World Social Forum of 2006 in Marocco. They put forward in their letter to the International Council of the WSF that choosing for a WSF in Marocco would continue "the globalisation of the alterglobalisationists" as started with the move of the WSF to Mumbai last year, and would furthermore add a Medeteranian, African, Berber and Arab dimension to the process. This is seen as contributing to a geostrategical widening of the WSF process. No decisions have yet been made as to whether (at all) or where or in what form the WSF of 2006 will take place.The WSF of 2007 is still set to take part in Africa.


4. NIGD November/December month events
Visit for NIGD November/December events our Rendezvous page


5. A conference on Civil Society Visions and Strategies
FIM (Montreal International Forum) is organising a conference on 29 May -1 June 2005 in Montreal on "Civil Society Visions and Strategies".