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	Financial transaction tax for 10 EU states by Robin Hood Tax Campaign   23 October 2012   The European Commission has backed plans from 10 countries to launch a financial transactions tax to help raise funds to tackle the debt crisis.   The 10 countries include France, Germany, Italy and Spain.   The nations want to push ahead with the tax after failing to win support from all members of the European Union.   The conservative UK Government has been especially vocal in its opposition to the tax, which it feels would hit the City of London financial center hard.   The remaining countries that have signed up to the tax are Austria, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia.   "I am delighted to see that 10 member states have indicated their willingness to participate in a common financial transaction tax (FTT)," said Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.   "This tax can raise billions of euros of much-needed revenue for member states in these difficult times.   "This is about fairness - we need to ensure the costs of the crisis are shared by the financial sector instead of shouldered by ordinary citizens."   September 19, 2012   The Robin Hood Campaign – A Movement, and Now Legislation Too, by Rose Ann DeMoro.   For many months, nurses, healthcare, environmental, labor, consumer, faith-based and other community activists have rallied on Wall Street, at banks and legislative offices, and outside the White House and Treasury Department, saying it is time to tax Wall Street to help revive our economy and nation.   Now it’s no longer just a movement. It’s also legislation, H.R. 6411, the Robin Hood tax, introduced in Congress by Rep. Keith Ellison, one of the most progressive voices in Washington.   H.R. 6411, formally known as the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would require the unaccountable Wall Street financiers and gamblers to begin to pay some restitution for all the damage they’ve caused to Main Street communities across the U.S.   Not coincidentally, the bill was introduced on the eve of the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that historic convergence that provided a critical reminder of the pervasive disparity in incomes and wealth in the U.S., and the salient point that the bankers got bailouts and bonuses while so many others were left behind.   H.R. 6411 begins to provide some redress.   With a small tax, just 50 cents on every $100 of stock trades, and a lesser amount on other trades of bonds, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Even at those rates, H.R. 6411 could generate as much as $350 billion every year.   As economist Robert Pollin, co-director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explains, “In its essentials, the idea of a financial market transaction tax is simple. It would mean that financial market traders would pay a small fee to the government every time they purchased any financial market instrument, including all stock, bond, options, futures, and swap trades. This would be the equivalent of sales taxes that Americans have long paid every time they buy an automobile, shirt, baseball glove, airline ticket, or pack of chewing gum, eat at a restaurant, or have their hair cut.”   Imagine, the average sales tax rate in the U.S. that consumers pay on almost all goods and services is 9.6 percent – yet J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the other financial giants on Wall Street pay no sales tax on the thousands, even tens of thousands of trades, they carry out every second.   No wonder this movement has so much resonance, with more than 115 national endorsers of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign to date, joining because they think Wall Street should pay its fair share, and because they know of the critical need for the revenue that would be raised.   The funds raised by H.R. 6411 would be available for such basics as rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure with good paying jobs, expanding and improving Medicare and Medicaid, investment in education and job training, and housing assistance for low income households. In other words, the basic needs so essential to the survival of a civil society and nation.   “The American public provided hundreds of billions to bailout Wall Street during the global fiscal crisis yet bore the brunt of the crisis with lost jobs and reduced household wealth,” said Rep. Ellison upon introduction of the bill. “This is a phenomenally wealthy nation, yet our tax and regulatory system allowed the financial titans to amass great riches while impoverishing the systems that enable inclusive prosperity. A financial transaction tax protects our financial markets from speculation and provides the revenue needed to invest in the education, health and communities of the American people.”   “Last summer, scientists proved that we can actually end the AIDS pandemic if we just scale up our investment in treatment and prevention programs,” said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health GAP (Global Access Project). “But when we go to Congress, all we hear about are budget cuts. We need to increase revenue and the Robin Hood Tax is the best of all proposals to do just that.”   Funds would also be available for global sustainable programs to tackle poverty, climate change, AIDS, and other international assistance.   Those goals are emulated across the planet by an international Robin Hood tax campaign that has already seen similar taxes adopted by more than 30 other nations, most recently France, with growing support across Europe.   There’s more. H.R. 6411 would add stability to the economy curbing turbulent short-term speculation – in some cases tens of millions of dollars in computerized trades occurring in minutes that has prompted huge upheavals in the market. Though the tax is tiny, it would make such rampant gambling less attractive to the investment banks, high frequency trading firms and hedge funds.   Introduction of H.R. 6411 does not mark an end to the great grassroots campaign for a Robin Hood tax that continues to grow, but an additional focus. In the coming days, weeks, and months, activists are planning more actions to build the campaign, and also asking supporters to urge other members of Congress to sign on to the bill.   * Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 160,000-member American National Nurses United. Visit the related web page
	Individual emphasis and the loss of community connection by Merrelyn Emery ABC Online Australia   May, 2012   Dissociation is a denial that cooperation with others could be more effective in reaching desired goals than acting alone or selfishly. It is essentially a denial of responsibility for the public space and the common good. As the names imply, it indicates a breakdown of community and the elevation of the withdrawn or isolated individual.   After the cultural revolution of the 1960-70s which aimed to return power to the people, elites unleashed a counter wave of action designed to keep the population in its place. The major forces in this counter wave included the widespread application of economic rationalism, "Thatcherism" or "Reaganomics". This so-called neoliberalism pushed free markets and the dismantling of the "welfare state", privatisation of public assets, deregulation, user pays, lower direct taxation and higher indirect taxation.   Together with union bashing where unions represent the power of collectivity as opposed to the individualism of the market, it was a full-scale assault on workers power and the social welfare state. And it was pursued globally.   In Australia, the demise of the Labor Whitlam government ushered in a period of conservative planning and policy making that caused economic hardship for many with rising unemployment. It was during this period that we first recorded a social swing towards passive maladaptive strategies, particularly dissociation.   The ascent of the Conservative Howard Government to power led to the use of economic rationalism to exploit the already hierarchical, authoritarian nature of organisational structures. In these organisations, inequality of status is inherent but people usually attempt to neutralise this inequality in various ways to promote cooperation and harmony.   Industrial relations in Australia, as happened just about everywhere around the world, were pushed, in the name of individual choice, away from any semblance of cooperation towards competition, with individual contracts and reduction of labour forces with employees doing more with less. It produced much higher levels of inequality. It also pitted person against person.   When people are forced to compete, they are forced to look after their own interests. Over time, self interest comes to dominate their attitudes and their lives. It does great damage to their emotional health and ultimately the health of their communities and the nation. It has been recorded from around the world that since economic rationalism took hold, our societies have become nastier, more selfish, divided, fearful and materialistic.   Economic rationalism reifies the "individual": it denies the need for a sense of belonging and our instincts for cooperation for the common good.   This reification of the individual is enshrined in Margaret Thatcher"s infamous pronouncement that "there is no such thing as society".   This pernicious theory has affected the way we see ourselves, the increasing privatisation of our lives and our search for individual liberation respectively.   In today"s cultures we have come to accept that the isolated, dissociated individual or family is the appropriate basic unit of society and it is the one that must be "liberated".   This runs contrary to thousands of years of human history and to the best advice of psychiatrists and social scientists. Isolated individuals, devoid of deeply meaningful and intimate human connections, and devoid of the comfort and support that these connections provide for any intrinsically social, group or pack animal are not the ideal but people in the process of becoming mentally ill. It is no wonder that we have a global epidemic of depression.   Mental health requires a balance of autonomy and belongingness to a larger, highly meaningful group or unit such as our traditional communities. Many now lack the latter. The relentless focus on the individual, the forces emanating from the also relentless push towards "individual choice" and also personal wealth through competition, have all led to a disregard for "other". Add in our new technologies which are themselves dissociative, with isolated individuals with anonymity in front of computers expressing themselves to a perceived hostile and competitive world, and the answer is complete.   * Merrelyn Emery is an Australian social scientist.
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