Attac Statement

Información - Transcripción

I. We no longer want an unjust world

• We no longer want a world where the basic rights of all the inhabitants of this planet (food, education, health, culture, energy, information, access to water, to housing, to a decent job, to retirement, etc.) are not enforced.
•  We no longer want a world founded on ever-increasing inequalities between citizens of the same country and between countries.
•  We no longer want a world of discrimination, be it against women, indigenous peoples, immigrants, young people, trade-unionists, disabled people or any other group.
• We no longer want a world that sacrifices future generations by squandering unrenewable resources and destroying natural habitats.
•  We no longer want a world founded on generalized commodification, in particular that of life, on the reduction of diversity, on the private appropriation of public goods, on the restriction of public spaces, and on unequal access to civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
• We no longer want a world founded on the denial of individual and collective freedoms, intolerance, moral rearmament, the criminalization of social movements and citizens.
•  We no longer want a world founded on the survival of the fittest and on a State terrorism that orchestrates widespread public insecurity, of which " war without limits " is the most recent and most criminal development.
• We no longer want a world in which citizens have been deprived of the right to protection and use of their local resources.

II. We hold the G8 leaders politically responsible

• The injustice that characterizes the world today is not inevitable: it is the consequence of economic and social policies that the G8 leaders have imposed. They are the first to be held politically responsible, along with the rulers of the countries that have accepted them.
•  The leaders of the G 8 countries have given most economic and financial powers to financial markets and multinationals, thus enforcing a dictatorship of big shareholders, and subordinating all public policies to their interests, including those of their own States.
• The leaders of the G 8 countries have done away with decolonization in their management of the debt crisis - for which they themselves are largely responsible - and in the imposition of adjustments of every community to the global market.
•  The leaders of the G8 countries have raised inequalities to unprecedented levels, favouring the concentration of wealth, encouraging tax havens, financial impunity and opportunities for mafia capital, dismantling mechanisms of redistribution of wealth and tax systems, destroying public services, undermining job and social protections, endangering job security, reducing salaries, managing financial crises through the dizzying growth of poverty, of unemployment and social marginality.
• By asserting their ambition to rule the world, the leaders of the G 8 countries have stripped of their contents international institutions, representative of all countries.
• The leaders of G8 countries have turned international financial institutions, particularly the IMF and the World Bank, into policemen of the neoliberal world order.
•  Through the World Trade Organization (WTO), the leaders of the G8 countries have subordinated all basic rights to the rights of business and, in the name of competition, given free rein to the misdeeds of oligopolies. They have hollowed out the multilateral, democratic regulation systems of the United Nations through rules that only serve the powerful.
• The leaders of G8 countries have created, notably with NATO, a gigantic imperial military apparatus of which they have delegated absolute command to the United States. This apparatus threatens to strike all countries and all political and social forces that oppose the interests of which they are the spokespeople.
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III. We demand other policies now
 The world is not doomed to suffer the ravages of neoliberal globalization, as opposed to the globalization of solidarity that we demand. There are many available proposals for making, without delay, this world less unjust.

• We demand the immediate cancellation of the debt of the global South, already paid many times over, and the recovery, by citizens, of hijacked public funds and massive bribes which have found their way to the vaults of international banks.
• We demand the immediate prohibition and elimination of tax, judicial, and bank havens, and the lifting of the impunity enjoyed by white collar criminals, including in its international financial dimensions.
•  We demand the immediate application of the emergency program advocated by the UNDP, giving guarantee of access to basic, essential services (food security, water, hygiene, education, health and domestic energy).
•  We demand the immediate creation of an international system of redistribution of wealth, in particular through capital and capital gains taxes, a system of global taxes ( among which the tax on currency speculation, better known under the generic name of the Tobin tax), and of ecotaxes, and their allocation to the financing of development, beginning with the access to basic rights for all.
•  We demand the immediate adoption of the additional protocol on economic, social, and cultural rights prepared by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, that makes for the universality of rights, their legally binding status, and the creation of courts in which citizens whose rights have been violated can seek legal redress. We note that certain States have neither adopted this protocol nor ratified the corresponding pact.
•  We demand the immediate recognition of forms of participatory democracy, complementary to representative democracy - whose rule must be reaffirmed– thus rooting social change in the involvement of citizens.

The G8 has no legitimacy to rule the world. Even if some of its leaders have been democratically elected at home, none of them has received a mandate to rule the rest of the world. This is why we oppose the existence of a directorate formed by the heads of states or governments of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, most of them former colonial powers. We also oppose cosmetic changes of the G20 or G28 type , which are only slightly less exclusive directorates, thus making harder the necessary redefinition of an international system facilitating the progress of worldwide
democracy.

This is why we challenge the legitimacy of the G8 and we demand its dissolution.