 Good evening to you all and thank you all for coming and especially thanks to our guest tonight, Dr. Susan George Of whom well, I must say that it's It's really what one can see that Susan is a global seasoned activist For for the causes she defends and the way I mean that she facilitates for any Person that the task of introducing her. I mean on her website. There's a very detailed short known Whatever you want. I mean all sizes of Bio and all that with even recommendations. I noted the one saying that I am not an economist I am not an economist. She is Susan is not an economist Susan George has academic degrees in French and government in philosophy and a PhD in political studies in in France in Paris and well Susan is mostly known through her books and her Activities in the in the global justice movement Well, I'll read although. I mean I mean because it's it's how to say it's quite convenient To have the presentation ready for for a presenter like myself She's the author of 14 books written in the French and English and widely translated many languages Susan George is president of the board of the transnational Institute in Amsterdam Which she describes as a decentralized fellowship of scholars living Throughout the world and whose work is intended to contribute to social justice And who are active in civil society in their own countries, which is definitely the case for Susan George for the country where she is based that is France She's presently honorary president of attack France attack For those among you who know about the history of the global justice movement the world social forums and all that attack is the organization that played the key role in setting all this on and Attack which is the acronym for association for taxation Well in front in French, but the translation would be association for taxation of financial transaction to to aid citizens Well, not exactly translation, but this is the meaning anyway And She before that before being honorary president Susan was vice president between 99 so very early very early stage beginnings of attack until mid 2006 and she's also a member of the scientific council of the same organization now She's the author of very very many many books and I mean from early titles were bestsellers in their In their kind like how the other half dies the real reasons for the hunger which was published in 76 and which I'm mentioning because it is available for free download on Susan's website The webpage you have you have it on the announcement of of this this lecture Well-known titles like a fate worse than depth 1987 book the depth boomerang 1992 And among her most recent books you have hijacking America how the religious and secular right changed what American think and this was published in 2008 so quite recent and already translated into several languages Weed the peoples of Europe book that came out also in the same year 2008 Another world is possible if Important well the whole book is in the if which is a discussion of the possibility of the world and this was published here I mean here in New York by Verso in 2004 And many other other books that you can find on on the the web page that I Mentioned so without further delay I Give the guest to our very distinguished guest the floor to our very distinguished guest and thank you very much You very much indeed she'll bear for Asking me I'm always flattered when I if I'm asked to such a prestigious Institution as so us I always feel flattered and honored and a little bit scared because I'm not really an academic I'm I am a scholar activist I do try to get my research right and to and to use it for the benefit of of People everywhere, but I'm not an academic and I suppose I'm a little bit jealous of academics in some way or I think They're a special kind of human, you know up there So I'm very flattered and honored to be here and I'm grateful to do bear also for organizing this series because I think you Know none of us know enough about Globalization and none of us can get enough different perspectives on it. So I'm sure that the other Talks in this series have been Valuable and I hope that mine will be too Well what I want to talk about the title is breaking up from crisis into a green and just world and What I would like to do is typically French you will recognize it three parts What's the nature of the crisis? What are the remedies and finally is it possible to apply these remedies and the first two parts? I think are very empirical very practical Not an enormous amount. I mean maybe I make some mistakes and you should tell me if I do But I think mostly there's not a huge amount of discussion about Those parts or at least I haven't seen any or I would have incorporated them But there's a lot of discussion about the last part Is it possible to apply the remedies that I will try to outline? So I'll try to go as fast as I can because this is the first time I've given this particular talk which is in fact a resume of Future book which is going to be published sometime this year and I don't know exactly when yet But which will be called their crises our solutions And I like the kind of us and them because I think the us and them is becoming becoming ever more distinct those who are profiting from the crisis are a tiny minority and But we when I say we I realize I abuse this pronoun all the time But when I say we I mean the kinds of decent honest thoughtful people that I meet all the time I'm like the people in this room and and And the ones that I think are prime candidates for doing something about the mess In the world, so I do use the pronoun we and forgive me if you think it I'm being abusively including you But that's what I'm going to do this evening and you can Then you can do what you like with Um So the problem is going to be is it possible to apply these remedies so What's the nature of the crisis? Well, first of all, it's not a crisis Everybody's now accepted this word But if you look for the definitions of crisis you will see that it comes from the Greek It means a decision the root is for this decision making and a crisis is a moment. It's a crossroads It's a moment where you go from Either you go towards death or you go towards recovery and in medicine in classical drama it's the moment where the Gordian knot is cut and the the rest of the the play is going to be the playing out of that of Cutting that Gordian knot in Chinese I asked a Synologist because very often you hear people say well in Chinese the the word for crisis is a Combination of danger and opportunity and I said is that true and he said no not really It's more of an occidental construct On the Chinese character, which he says is more like the trigger of the arbalette that that you are going to stretch and then The launch whatever the missile is and that is that's what the character for crisis is So in Chinese in Greek in whatever language possibly others here I'm sure you speak there are many people who speak many other languages I'd be interested to hear how you define crisis and where it comes from in your language But this isn't a crisis because it's chronic and I'm just going to go very quickly through a Series of of crises that have occurred only Since the early 1980s and I'll just list them because you will see that these crises are getting closer and closer together And I would argue that we are more often in a state of what people call crisis than we are in what others would call a normal period so 1982 you have the Mexican debt crisis when Mexico declares a default there's a huge emergency meeting in in New York and a solution is found and The debt crisis is still not over as as everybody knows from Mexico. It goes all over the world And it becomes a kind of permanent crisis for the South 1985-86 you have the savings and loan crisis in the United States which also continues for several years. There are 745 failures of Savings and loans which are like British building societies with a bill for the government which comes to a hundred and thirty billion dollars that the US government Forks out to save these institutions meanwhile a few Texas and and other southern investors become very very rich having incited this crisis in 1987 on October 19th the Dow Jones stock index goes down by 23% in a single day unprecedented event And a trillion dollars in paper wealth on the stock market is wiped out Overnight and then this spreads to other markets This did not go very far and there was quite a quick recovery But it was still seen as a total disaster at the time 1990 Japan is struck by crisis and that is still going on 20 years later Japan's economy has never emerged From that initial event Well the 1990s were Although perhaps in the north we don't always remember this the ILO the International Labor Organization has made a list of 90 crises that took place in countries from Algeria to Zambia in the south Where the currencies were attacked? speculation against the The currency and they define a serious crisis by a drop in the value of at least 35 percent in the space of two months And there were 90 of these throughout the decade they they measure between 1990 and 2002 But these are all over the world and then of course this culminates in Totally visible crises in Asia starting with Thailand and then South Korea Indonesia I remember I happened to be in Thailand while these crises were spreading through Asia like wildfire and the headlines of the Bangkok Post said 35,000 bank employees sacked In Indonesia this week People were losing their jobs right and left Trade absolutely stopped because no one would leave the goods on the on the pier Unless they had been paid in cash The people were committing suicide because they lost their jobs and they had no way of feeding their families This was serious business and then this spread into Latin America to Turkey to Russia This went all over the world So these major currency crises Were extremely serious and should have been a warning Then back to the United States 2001 Enron. You probably remember the name it had Lied about its debts and about its profits It had 25 billion dollars in debt that it had never owned up to and Had it understated What its liabilities were but it had opened nearly 700? subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands So that all of these things could be hidden very carefully and very cleverly From view but that collapsed and that simply took away all the pensions from a whole from thousands of employees After having blacked out most of the west coast of the United States And then of course as we approach our own time 2001 2002 the crisis of Silicon Valley the dot-com bubble Which collapses and a lot of stocks which were being heavily invested in are shown to be Absolutely worthless and then in 2007 the subprime crisis starts So I'm just trying to convince you that we are not in a crisis We are in a chronic situation and I don't believe that this particular crisis since that is now the standard term Is at all over I think we are going towards something which will be much worse because Since the same causes produce the same effects and since we are Literally giving money to the banks now they can borrow at practically zero percent and lend out at three or four or five percent you don't have to be a genius to make money under those conditions and They are now going exactly back to their old ways Except with a couple of twists the nicest twist that I have seen is That now because there's no longer any point in speculating on sub primes Because all those people practically have been turfed out of their homes last year well in 2008 already 2.8 million families were thrown out onto the street from their homes, which they had hoped they were trying to participate in the American dream and and lost to the sharks and Last year it was worse. It was 3.2 million and There will be many many more again this year. I don't know how many but this is still going on So there's no point in speculating on On packages of loans these these are what I call the toxic sausages because what the banks do is take a whole lot of Different kinds of debt they put them they can be student loan debts You know in the u.s. You wouldn't you wouldn't be here in the u.s Most of if you were in the u.s Most of you because you would have had to borrow at least a hundred thousand dollars to come to sow us for two or three years So it's pretty hard. You know you spend 15 years paying back Which is why people try to go into lucrative jobs because the kids in the u.s. Can't They can't join an NGO. They can't work for nothing. They have their student loan to pay off So anyway student loans Automobile loans credit card loans many people in the u.s. Have six to seven credit cards, which are really Revolving funds where they're charged very high interest, but they can get They can renew them by paying back one and then the other and so on and then of course The mortgage loans and all of those mixed together In a great cauldron and pulled out and rolled up and then cut into slices and put into packages of Toxic sausages which nobody except a very few people in the bank itself know what's in them But these were sold all over the world because they were given very high ratings This is I'm if I start on this story will be here at midnight. So I'm going to stop there, but We are going back into other bubbles and the bubble I wanted to tell you about which I think is particularly nauseating is that the banks are now buying up insurance policies from chronically ill and old People who are selling their insurance policies because they need the cash because otherwise they could not get health care So let's say you have a policy, which is a life policy, which is worth a million dollars And you will sell it to the bank for 400,000 And the bank will mix up this time not student car Credit card and house loans, but alzheimer's cancer Diabetes And that's what they're making the loans out of so they dose the diseases and then they sell These on as packages and it's better If the people die earlier rather than later because then the return is going to be much greater To those who buy these loans. This seems to be the new the new thing with the banks I've only seen one serious article about it, but I think it's I think it's definitely the kind of things these banks would do and We are going to have probably a bubble in government paper You can't issue Bonds continually Goldman Sachs taking a commission by the way on every one of them Goldman Sachs is now making a hundred million dollars not a Month not a week, but a day hundred million dollars a day For Goldman Sachs and a lot of that comes from marketing government paper There's not it's not a government agency that markets the bonds. It's a private Investment Bank and now that layman brothers has failed there's less competition and Goldman Sachs is on easy street now that we could tell stories about them too Okay the Anyway, it's not a crisis. There's going to be more bubbles and we are in a continuum of Financial Wrongdoing which is legal and which is going to continue because there is a great deal of money to be made doing it for some and Second it's not just financial although finance has moved practically everything else off the front pages But if you look at what kind of world we are living in now this neo liberal world these 30 years of neoliberalism which began here with Margaret Thatcher and in the US with Ronald Reagan in 1979 80 and so they've had 30 years That's what this book called hijacking America was about changing what Americans think Making everybody believe that private is always better than public that the market always knows best at the market will always make wise decisions and So on well these have these policies have done Exactly what they were intended to do and what they were intended to do was to concentrate money at the top and To make sure that everyone that was not at the top was in an extremely precarious Position there have been enormous gains for capital over these past 30 years Not just through privatization Although that has been I don't even call it privatization. I call it alienation Because what it amounts to is handing over the result of the work of hundreds if not thousands of people over decades and Just taking the result of all of that work and giving it to private capital and there was a great, you know Human cry that do actually the employees were profiting from this in the various British industries British gas and so on that were that were Privatized but in fact the employees of these companies never bought more than 1% of all the stock It was always the very large investors that profited from these marketings of of previously public companies and Once deregulation starts and once you stop taxing rich people Naturally, the state is less in a position to provide public services and therefore it has a good argument for with public services are become more Problematic degraded. There's a good excuse for privatizing them and When you don't get deregulation automatically you pay for it That's what the banks did in the United States They spent five billion dollars over a couple of decades and they got a dozen regulations Utterly removed by the Congress they lobbied for it and the most important one that they got rid of which We will well, they're two very important ones But the one I speak of now that we will go back to was called the Glass-Steagall Act Is that a familiar term to you? Yeah, some of you what that did that it was named after it was the one of the first measures passed in the new deal of 1933 and what it did was to separate The commercial banks that is to say the retail banks where you deposit your salary and you write checks And you have a debit card on that account from the investment banks the Goldman Sachs is the lemons of the Bear Stearns Is etc and Separating those meant That it would be impossible for the investment bank to serve its you know to grab the money Service that's not what I meant to sell here You know to take the money in private accounts and use that for their own trading accounts And it was very important to keep these two functions separate because as soon as they got rid of this act And that's a long and interesting saga how they did it with City Corp at the forefront of the effort As soon as they were able to do it they became what is now known as too big to fail But not too big to bail too big to fail because Suddenly investment banks commercial banks insurance All kinds of financial services were able to come together and be housed under a single roof and under a single label on the stock market and The banks made absolutely enormous profits and the financial sector assumed an Importance which had it had never had before in the 1950s half of all bank loans in the United States went to What is called the real economy where actual goods and services are produced and Distributed and the investment came from the banking system and half of it went to the real economy and Now over 80 percent of all bank loans go to the financial sector So it's a completely incestuous circuit the banks are financing the financial sector and Contrary to what Marx said who would I think be appalled if he were to return? you don't go from commodities and actual production and sales and investment and profit and Reinvestment in actual things and actual machinery and workers that you exploit of course But you don't bother with all of that you go from money to money to money to money And you can sell the same house six times and each time with the profit And you can put the same house in a in a mixture in a toxic sausage six times and sell it on and each time You're going to be making money and and that is exactly what the banks have managed to do but it's not that simple either because It's not just that they were able to get this deregulation, but it's also How they were able to wipe out many many social gains that had been made After the war particularly during the New Deal and then especially after the war not just in the US But also in Britain and in continental Europe and just to give you a few I'm not going to drown you in figures, but just a few figures that the European Value added the way it was divided in 1974 Labor was getting 74 percent of the value added in economic activity in a year and therefore Capital was getting 26 percent and 30 years later now. It is Capital is getting 40 percent not 26 and labor is getting 60 not 74 Now this isn't trivial those are figures for the for Europe Economists like to have arguments about whether that's accurate or not I I use that one, but you can let's say it's only ten points of change Because I haven't seen any serious Estimates under that that labor is now has ten points less of value added and capital has ten points more This is not small change, right? This is we are talking about the entire GDP of Europe, which is something like thirteen thousand billion dollars So we're talking one point three trillion dollars that has been two or one point three Thousand billion that has been taken out of the pocket of labor and put into the into the pockets of capital So this is this isn't trivial I've got to go faster because I can so that's one consequence because when you when you change the Destination that means less invested in the real economy. That means fewer jobs. That means overproduction and it means That people are simply not able To live at the standard of living that they were able to do that before in the US They did it slightly differently They simply allowed wages to stagnate and the labor unions were too weak to do anything about it but this has resulted in Unprecedented levels of inequality Unprecedented since the 1920s in any case. I highly recommend to you to get a sense of what inequality Means and why it is important to read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's book, which is called the spirit level I don't like the title very much But what it means is a spirit level is how you measure if a wall is straight or not, you know a floor is straight and And they show that not only How how much the how much the balance has changed? But they show that the countries with the greatest inequalities are also those with the greatest prison populations the highest number of mental illness cases the most problematic children with With psychiatric complications the most obesity It goes on and on and and so these things are very expensive To society in general and people no longer trust each other and social cohesion is lost And I am sorry to say that not only is the US always out on the frontiers of inequality But it is always closely trailed by Great Britain So I ask you to read that book because I can't go into detail here But it's not only that capital has been enriching itself in the north In the south we now have quite firm evidence that there have been transfers out of Sub-Saharan Africa of at least 420 billion dollars over the 30 years starting in about 1974 Which with interest would come to over 600 billion dollars most of this coming from loans and grants that were being brought in via the World Bank the IMF various national countries And most of it Sent back to tax havens and private accounts 60% of it left the same year that it arrived in Africa. There are other studies which say that the figures are much higher, but Everywhere the elites have been able to profit from the From from deregulation and from lax Regulation and from also Simply the fact of globalization so that the inequality crisis I think is is reaching Unheard-of levels another crisis is of the basic necessities of food and water for tens of millions of people in 1920 in in sorry in 2008 and Another hundred million people were plunged into hunger because of the huge increase in food prices Now that had various causes. It's never unicausal But most of the causes were the heaviest ones were the investment in agri-fuels Substituting good agricultural land not to produce crops, but to produce ethanol for automobiles One tank full for one SUV is equivalent to feeding one person a decent diet for a year And that is where one third of the corn land in the United States has been transferred so in not in 2008 there were Food riots or what people locally call them movements against expensive basics In 30 different countries and that is also unprecedented because usually in history famine and really Serious hunger episodes would take place locally you could say it happened here and it happened for very specific Local reasons either political or climatic, but no Bangladesh and Bolivia don't have very much in common culturally or economically and this happened in 30 different places and Water is becoming much scarcer also because of global warming the glaciers are disappearing Who knows what Bolivians are going to drink when the Andean glaciers have melted all of this is going much faster Than was foreseen Climate change is going to increase conflicts. It is going to influence refugees what we see now as migration is going to be Minuscule compared to the numbers of people who will be trying to escape from impossible conditions where they are because we already know that where Things are already dry. They will become drier and Where they are humid they will become more so so more floods on one side more droughts on another more deserts and The movement of people is going to accelerate it is already starting in some places They begin by trying to go Somewhere else in their own country or to a neighboring country But there they they have problems and they will so there is going to be a vast movement of people attempting to reach Europe and they will try because as we have seen They risk their lives and very often lose their lives trying to come to Europe now I think this is largely due to European policies But that would be another subject and it's not the one of this evening So food the water extreme weather events These are all going to multiply and over all of this looms climate disaster Which is provoking more conflicts already, but will provoke far more in in the future and I think the climate disaster and what happened in Copenhagen is the most serious of all because if you make an enormous effort sometimes you can go back and start over where politics and Social choices are concerned you could fix inequality with an enormous effort politically and socially But you can't do that with climate once it's off the chart. It's off the chart and that's it and you can say I'm very sorry But James Hansen who is the probably the most well-known climatologist in the world He's a driving force in the IPCC He has just written a book. He's the man who has always said glaciers are melting faster than we thought And arctica and the arctic and the permafrost in the arctic are melting faster than we thought and now he has Published a book which the review in the new scientist I haven't read the book itself But the review a couple of weeks ago in the new scientist says this is the most terrifying book you are ever going to read and Hansen thinks that if that the governments are all lying and if that if something is not done soon The oceans at one point are going to start to boil and there will be no chance I'm not speaking about civilized life on earth. I'm talking about life on earth Period, that's the way he sees it. So we've got a crisis of Justice the guilty are being rewarded the innocent are being punished through unemployment through All kinds of hardships The European Union is going to be among the hardest hit places in the world in terms of increases in unemployment That comes from the ILO a Crisis of hunger a crisis of climate of conflicts Etc. So we are in a kind of concentrated moment Where all these crises are converging and are making each other worse So finally I've got to point the second point and I must go faster What are the remedies well their remedies I think are Totally inadequate the G20 this self-proclaimed world government Is is not up to the task and I'm sorry to say that the fact that the bricks Have joined doesn't seem to change anything I get the impression that the brick people are so delighted to be at the table with the G8 that they are just shivering with with pleasure and They're not making any any noises and they are in the same league and the same league means we are looking For business as usual as soon as we can get back to the usual. So what they've done is To give the IMF which was at death's door $750 billion without any conditions the IMF can use that just the way it used its money over the 70s 80s and 90s which is to say creating tremendous hardship They've made the World Bank the head of the clean development mechanism and of all sorts of environmental The the World Bank is the head of the environmental department for the for the G20 and this is also not just ludicrous but tragic because the World Bank group Continues with its private arm the International Finance Corporation to lend massively to coal and oil and Gas projects. It's as lent in the most recent Survey by the Institute for Policy Studies eight billion dollars Two fossil fuel projects. This is the last institution that should be allowed To have a hand in anything to do with climate. It's giving the fox the keys to the henhouse and the They've made some some gestures about tax havens, but these two have been ridiculous because What happened at the first one was that they had a list of the OECD countries that were supposed to be dirty countries They were not complying and Suddenly four days after that G8 meeting in April of last year all those countries were off the list Well, they hadn't been really the most serious tax havens to begin with Uruguay the Philippines a couple of others But they're not the G8 that there's a long story about that, but the G8 is not doing anything serious about climate change and as for bailing out the banks with our money The estimates go from five thousand billion to fourteen thousand billion and I take fourteen because that comes From a couple of researchers at the Bank of England, and that's I think is a fairly credible source Figures that they presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve of Chicago in the US and They put the Savings of bombing the bailouts of banks and other enterprises For the pound of the dollar and the euro at fourteen trillion dollars now Some of that has been paid back But this crisis is definitely not over for people The unemployment I mean I've mentioned this but you can all see why this isn't the case and what's more the banks aren't lending They are not lending to small and medium-sized businesses to householders and so on. They're often hoarding the cash So what would be genuine genuine remedies? Well the way I see things now The world as it is organized if you look at it in terms of concentric circles You have the outer circle the most Powerful and important one is labeled finance Then there's a circle inside that that represents the real economy, but it's finance. That's dominating the real economy and inside Those two you have Society, but it's finance and the economy that are dictating to society how it must be organized not the other way around and finally the least important of all and the smallest is The biosphere is the planet Which is for conventional? Economics the place where we get our raw materials and the place we throw away our greenhouse gas And our other rubbish But that's all it is and that is the way it is still treated By conventional economics and therefore by most of the governments of the world So what would be? Real remedies what I'm going to say is entirely practical. This is not Utopian these are not Possible things to do these are things that are for which the plans exist for which we know how to do which Specialists can tell you exactly how to write the software Etc etc First of all, I think we have to have regulation of course everybody agrees on better regulation now for example Putting back the Glass-Steagall type act into place. Yes, of course I don't think derivatives should be allowed, but there are a lot of sober people who think derivatives can play a useful role. I'm not going to elaborate on the on the regulation, but Best of all, I mean if citizens everywhere have spent Five to take the low figure to fourteen thousand billion dollars That money has not come out of the air that is coming out of our pockets out of our futures our children Our grandchildren, and this is going to go on for a long time And it's not only coming in direct money in taxes. It's also coming in Terms of public services not supplied of unemployment compensation not supplied of jobs not provided Etc etc So I would like You to make a small effort which will make me feel great if you don't mind doing it because when I came to the demo in Against the G8 to G20 Last year on March 31st I got this huge crowd in Hyde Park to say it with me, and I'd like you to say it with me now The banks are ours Would you just please say that? Thank you, that sounds so good because it's true, you know, it really is true They are ours, and you've got to get used to saying that So we should Socialize them they should become public utilities They should be forced to lend at least in part Because you maybe can't take over if they haven't been bailed out But certainly enough of them have been bailed out that you could take them over Squarely and fairly and say okay now you are going to lend to small and medium enterprise That's got a green project. We already know there's lots of studies that show that green jobs are You can create a lot more jobs through green projects Which are not delocalizable, and they are jobs for a high skills highly paid highly successful economy, so First priority Small and medium enterprise that's got a green project better still one that's got a green and social project or a social project Meaning one in which the workers Have an interest other than just working there and earning a salary by that I mean and I was going to tell you the story of Lucas aerospace But for those of you who are too young ever to have heard of Lucas aerospace look it up It's a wonderful story, but with a very sad ending. It's a story in 1974 and years beyond of workers figuring out how to produce socially useful things in factories that were Producing only armaments at the time even 30 years ago. They invented fantastically ecological goods and social socially useful goods medical technology and Then it was the thing was killed, but that is the kind of ideal. I mean Don't bail out General Motors and Opel and whatever the company is here that's being bailed out Pay the workers for two years to make their own plan What could we produce with the same people the same knowledge the same skills and the same machinery? Surely we could use much more democracy In our enterprises and there's no reason that democracy should stop at the door of the economy Democracy is not just something which is for politics only and then hopefully for politics not even there always And then maybe you know one day the economy. No, we could do that right away and second priority, of course the to go to the to Householders who want to refit their houses or have solar panels in their roofs, you know in Britain There are builders who know exactly how to build energy neutral buildings and Tony Blair refused they these builders asked to have a building code Which would make them competitive because their product is 10 or 15 percent more expensive At the outset except you never have another energy bill in your whole life, but Blair refused to do that That seems to me Not a very wise decision and we should be helping people and helping companies that want to build In a green way Now how to pay lots of people say well all of this is all very well Yes, we would like to have a green new deal. That's another thing You should read as the green new deal by the new economics foundation. I could go into great detail on that This is something I think is the big plan It's to do what Franklin Roosevelt did but to do it green and our politicians have talked about this a little and Obama Has a very small one and Sakhozi has a very small one, but we need to do this a hundred percent For the relaunching of the economy Well how to pay because governments say to us well, this is all very well. These are excellent ideas But we can't afford it because we've just had to bail out the banks etc. That is nonsense We can perfectly well afford it We can tax people who are no longer taxed at all Under the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower in the United States the top tax bracket Was taxed at 90% Today it's 35 because we've spent the last 30 years reducing taxes on the rich And I wish I had time to tell you about Merrill Lynch's world wealth report Which even after the crisis had identified what it calls high net worth individuals and ultra high net worth individuals who have between 1 and 30 million and up to play around with in liquid money and There are 8.6 million of those people in the world that's smaller than greater London and together they have 38 Trillion dollars 38 Thousand billion dollars which is three times the GDP of the European Union or the United States it's 12 times the GDP of India and that belongs to 8.6 million people who are almost not taxed at all because they are the kind who can make and take advantage of tax havens and Of all kinds of advice so that they are not Subject to the same taxes as everyone else who has a fixed address and is identifiable So that means tax those people and above all close down the tax havens where the lowest estimate of Haven't how much is stashed is about 12,000 billion dollars Which means at least 250 billion a year in lost revenues for government I think we should finally solve the debt crisis once and for all by exchanging total debt cancellation For reforestation and bioconservation in the south Forests are the best absorbers of co2. I Don't see why we can't pay people through local communities where they are to replant trees where they already live and In exchange the government should be getting debt relief and it shouldn't get that relief unless it accepts bioconservation When we started on the debt campaigns the jubilee 2000 campaigns and all of that and made a great human chain in Birmingham in 1998 At that point the hippics the highly indebted poor countries owed 102 billion now they owe a hundred and billion and some so the reduction over 10 years has been 1.4 percent Now this who do they think they're kidding they were promising debt relief in 1998 and virtually nothing has happened So let's do this once for all and we could issue euro bonds. We have a central bank in Europe that does nothing except control inflation It should be like a normal Central bank issuing bonds for big green infrastructure projects that no country can do by itself even the richest ones and We should change the rules of the WTO the World Trade Organization because if we don't and we continue to go with the Intellectual property agreement called trips Then poorer countries are never going to get green technology because they will have to pay through the nose for 20 years So those are just a few Practical suggestions, which I don't think are utopian take a lot of Political effort of course because the bankers Always protest and always say but this will change You know this will bring down civilization as we know it if we have to pay one per thousand on a Currency tax or even there's all kinds of taxes you can invent at attack We like the one on currency trades But this should also apply to any other kind of financial products that you know Keynes Keynes and his younger colleague Roy Harrod used to like to go out and get drunk together and invent new taxes And I think we we could really use Keynes and Harrod today You know and invent new taxes, but carbon taxes and various things like that because there's plenty of money out there Don't let anyone tell you that there isn't so Big problem here, and here's where I ask for your input. Is it possible? To apply these remedies and bring about real change whereas we know that real change is absolutely urgent Well, this is the question that I asked myself all the time, and I don't really know how to answer it Obviously the question is can one do all of this under capitalism and my temperament says well, no probably not But my Hope says well, there's got to be another way because I don't see a one-off Destruction of capitalism I really don't see it I hope if some of you see it you will tell me where it is you will tell me where is the winter palace today You will tell me what is the name of the Tsar and where can we go? in order to overthrow this This domination, but I honestly don't see it. I would like to but so if you say well, no you can't overthrow a Capitalism and therefore the planet is going to go to hell and all of this inequality will continue and people will continue to suffer Needlessly and so on well that's despair to me, and I'm I'm not into despair So I think you know we haven't we haven't the money So we have to think as one of your finance ministers said a while ago Well, we haven't we haven't the way to get rid of capitalism. So we've got to think and and what I try to think about is Is how can we organize and how can we? Bring about such force among people who have always been the driving force in any kind of change in the world so that We can make progress and that we can say the the history of human emancipation is not over and It seems to me that the only way to do that is through much broader alliances through much better popular education and that Although the state has been very largely privatized and Europe is a particular problem there Democracy is the only answer and sometimes I do take heart from the fact that ten years ago We were nowhere ten years ago was was Seattle 1999 Nobody people didn't know each other Activists in Europe didn't know the ones in the US who didn't know those in Asia who didn't know those in Latin America Now we know each other. There's been ten years of social forums. There have been alliances created. There are international Organizations via Campesina the farmers organization small farmers organization with over 50 branches Around the world is probably the most successful But there are a lot of others. There's the tax justice network attack is active in Continental Europe in Africa and in several countries in Latin America and we tend to have good contacts We have trade networks also of people who Meet each other when the WTO has a ministerial or when then there's another big Urged emergency in the area of trade So there has been progress and perhaps the only good thing that came out of Copenhagen was that now I think what we call the social movements which are pretty much labor and and People fighting for less inequality and more employment and so on but the social movement anti-racism and anti Discrimination movements and so on I think now the junction has been made with the ecological movements Which wasn't the case before in Seattle? We said to teamsters and turtles united at last The teamsters, you know, that's the truckers union in the in the US And the turtles were there because they were being destroyed by certain of practice I mean a decision of the WTO to allow People to fish without putting turtle excluder devices on their boats And there were protesters to save the turtles and the teamsters were in the same demonstration And the banner was teamsters and turtles united at last, but it wasn't really true And now I think it is true I think the environmentalists and the social movements and labor movements have understood That we all need each other and none of us Special interest groups can succeed alone in other words farmers by themselves cannot change land tenure and agricultural problems and unions by themselves cannot change labor issues completely and and Succeed women by themselves cannot Obtain all of the other gains that the feminist movement needs to obtain and So on so we have to come together. It's the same for the ecologists by themselves They cannot win on issues like Copenhagen So all I can say is that the goal ought to be to change the order of those circles that I described And make sure that climate is at the outside because that is the real constraint If we don't get that right everything else will be wrong So climate should be the big constraint at the outside and then society which ought to be free democratically to decide how it wants to be organized and those organizations will be different according to different histories different cultures different Different levels of struggle also But society should be the driving force that says and we will have in order to do these things an economy that works in such and such a way and Then finance would be just the last smaller circle a tool in the service of the economy But not the master anymore So I hope that if we Are able to do some of these things and I see many young people becoming interested in joining these movements Don't ask me what can I do just Join something pick an aspect of the crisis. I've tried to give a capsule version of many of these various crises take an aspect that interests you most and do it well and Build alliances another big stepping stone. We've got to make is to bring the peace movement into all of this It is still very much separate from the social ecological movement And that would be a major advance if we could because there's lots of group Groups working on peace and conflict issues and we don't know them and they don't know us So those are just a few suggestions About how we might build more Resilience into our societies because if we don't do that pretty fast and if our economy is always going towards higher faster bigger taller More money more More everything It's we're stretching the elastic to the point that it's going to break and I would rather not live through the next crisis So we should all get organized to get rid of this one. Thank you very much