by Jeffery J. Smith, Portland, OR
George Bush, former president Jimmy Carter,
currency trader George Soros, US Ambassador to the UN John
Negroponte, and economists Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor
to nations in transition (poor them) and to UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan, and Hernando de Soto, author of "The
Mystery of Capital" which urges debt upon Third World
property owners, among other top politicians and
counselors, spoke at the UN Conference on Financing For
Development held in Monterrey, Mexico, March 18-22,
preceded by the UN NGO Forum, March 14-16. March 17 was
left open for protest marches. For the first time at a UN
event, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO participated.
Subbing for Alanna Hartzok * (however
inadequately), this writer, enabled by the Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation and representing the International
Union for Land-Value Taxation and Free Trade, gave a talk
at the preceding NGO Forum and had a seat, more honorary
than participatory, at one of the "Roundtables". This term
was purely figurative, being confabs of several hundred
people seated in rows during one of several concurrent
sessions.
( * editor's note: Hartzok attended the Second
Congress of the Federation of African Greens Parties,
Dakar, March 7-11 -- more in a later GroundSwell issue.)
All together, about six thousand attended the
event, not counting police. It was held in a conference
center enormous enough to comfortably house an airplane
hangar. Security was tight and ubiquitous but polite and
occasionally multi-lingual.
One of the marches had a dress code - shorts for
males and mini-skirts for females, to accustom traditional
Mexicans to the demands of modern women (out of conference,
the joke told by local males was about wife-beating). The
march, organized by the father of the host of this
reporter, an ex-deputy in Congress, current candidate for
the Senate, drew 20 to 30 thousand marchers, protesting for
the poor. Ironically, the organizer and my generous host,
Ricardo Cantu, is a wealthy owner of real estate. In the
struggle of rich versus poor, land remains the invisible
factor.
Georgists need to be present and noted at such
events. Many of the people who attend are interested in
fresh ideas like geonomics and are in positions to help the
cause. This event was high-level, hosted by the Mexican
president, Vicente Fox. Titled "Financing for
Development", with a track called "Mobilizing Domestic
Resources" that included the term "taxation" in its
descriptive blurb, organizers seemed to be begging for the
good Georgist word.
For several reasons, I left after a week of
meetings, yet a couple days short of the conference end.
Since I learned that I'd fill in for Alanna Hartzok only
weeks before the event, all the cheap airplane seats and
hotel rooms had been reserved by those who'd already made
plans. As it turned out, before finding a kindly host, I
had to spend $130/night for a three star hotel. Plus,
since the organizers had no advance program, by the time I
had to make reservations, I did not know when I'd be
presenting. Furthermore, the two minutes allotted to NGO
representatives to speak at Roundtables are often used up
by ministers running overtime. Ironically, the Roundtable
that I was allowed to sit at occurred the day of my
departure.
At the earlier NGO Forum, the outdoor buffet was
$8.00, while a meal in an outdoor restaurant was $2.00, and
a small bottle of water in that very dry and windy heat was
over a dollar. At the official conference, the world's tax
dollars were at work. Almost all the males wore expensive
dark suits and rarely left the air-conditioning. The
hostesses were tall and slender models and not necessarily
dark-haired. Telephones were free; people made calls to
all over the planet. Gratis, too, were computers, copiers,
and paper for the blizzard of documents that someone
somewhere sometime may yet read. The welcoming feast's
leftovers could've fed the barrio's thousands.
The UN is a subculture. For a first-timer, it
seemed a bit chaotic; the program was not issued in
advance, nor at registration, but daily. For the
high-level meetings, the program listed the time, which was
long, and the general topic, and the participating
governments and NGOs, but not the names of the speakers or
the titles of anyone's talk. Minutes listed the speaker's
name and titles but not his points. More important than
eradicating poverty were all the honorifics and dress code
for the social events. These trappings of respect will
come to Georgists only after the reform has already been
put into practice.
Despite the new objective of the conference, most
speakers ground the same old ax. Nothing can be done until
the corporations, lenders, and Northern governments let
them by repealing their unfair ways. Their most popular
reform was the familiar "you got it, we need it, hand it
over".
Bridging this leftist position was a rightist one,
heard all thru the conference, of abolishing the subsidies
that stymie development, notably the ones beneath agri-biz.
From the spending to the taking, many also called for taxes
upon pollution, quite popular, to "internalize the
externalities". One of many, the academic group, the
German Advisory Council on Global Change, presented
"Charging the Use of Global Commons". Since they're
already examining public revenue impacts, these numerous
voices are probably ready to discuss the less obvious
aspect of geonomics, recovering rent.
At the earlier Forum, it was hectic. There was no
time between events other
than a lunch break. Still, old-timers knew where to be
when. Presentations started late and went over, so the
schedule got hopelessly behind.
My talk was on the first day, but at 8:00 PM at the
end of an exhausting day. By then, only a few showed up.
At least they liked what they heard, and tried to arrange a
second presentation for me. Afterwards, the reporter for
the main daily, Irma Deyanira Gonzales Garza of El Norte,
interviewed me for a feature article in the Sunday paper
(March 24, also on the web).
Organizers of the NGO Forum read to the assembled
ministers our two-day old declaration that the NGOs had
produced. The governmental delegates to the UN did not
pack the house. Yet even during speeches by ministers,
meeting halls buzzed with private, side conversations that
half the audience engages in. The Deputy Secretary General
of the UN, Louise Frechette, to balance the brief
opportunity to speak afforded NGOs, at the last minute gave
NGOs an audience of 45 minutes, that fell on the morning of
my departure.
The exclusive editors of the declaration that came
out of the NGO Forum replaced the Georgist input that my
track had consensed upon with some independent sentiments
of their own (this by people who demand democracy from
above but do not extend it to below). This despite the
fact that the UN already accepted land-value taxation in
Habitat II and in their Technical Notes leading up to
Monterrey. The land tax is a tax upon everyone and is not
obviously progressive. Plus, most countries already have a
land tax, albeit at a low rate: for example, Mexico in the
Third World, Estonia in the Second World, and Sweden in
the First World.
A tax reform that was popular and reiterated time
and again was the Tobin Tax, an admitted attempt to tax the
rich. Instead of urging the left to co-promote the land
tax, it may be easier to popularize "the sharing of social
surpluses in lieu of taxing useful output and subsidizing
wasteful production". Just as the Tobin Tax ** sums up
something more complex, this mouthful might be reduced to a
"Citizens Dividend". Forgoing popularity, it may be easier
to advance geonomics not with activists but with
establishment institutions, like US AID.
( ** The Tobin
tax would be a levy on currency trades.)
Typical of conferences, most of the best work took
place out of sessions. Even though time between sessions
was not in the schedule, people still took off to talk
informally. I connected with thirty people from South and
North America who want to do more to advance geonomics (the
shift of taxes landward, off production, the shift of
subsidies citizen-ward, away from special interests).
Most encouraging was the warm reception by representatives
of US AID and the World Bank who responded positively to
collaboration. Sending a Georgist to such conferences does
pay off.
The Monterrey conference followed on the heels of
the inaugural conference of the US Basic Income Group in
New York, CUNY Grad School on March 2, where this writer also gave a presentation. ***
The keynoter was Brazilian Senator Eduardo Suplicy. The
most promising consequence was meeting the Vice President
of the National Homeless Coalition, Terri Schofield, whose
boyfriend was a real estate investor on his way to meet
President Bush. Both took me to dinner in a limousine.
Terri invited me to present geonomics at the annual
conference of the coalition in Washington in April, an
invitation declined as funds are lacking. A half dozen
others I talked to were also receptive to funding a housing
voucher to all residents from local rents.
( *** see
separate article, "From Red to Green", in this
GroundSwell.)
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(Jeffery J. Smith (geonomist@juno.com) is the president of
The Geonomy Society and is editor of The Geonomist.