Sharing Our Common Heritage
via the Tax Shift Agenda
Alanna Hartzok
Alanna Hartzok is one of two United Nations Non-Governmental
Organization representatives for the
International Union
for Land Value Taxation
. This is the text of Hartzok's speech at the
August 1, 1998 banquet at the
Council of Georgist
Organizations
conference in Portland, Oregon.
Our theme is sharing the common heritage via the tax
shift agenda. And basically I am just going to do some
sketches of what we are up against in terms of
globalization, and the massive privatization of land and
resources of the planet, and the kind of havoc that is
causing. But also in the crisis of that we have the
opportunity to really affirm the whole context, which I see
as important to the
Georgist
movement, of common heritage
resources.
There are several movements in that direction that I
think are going to really help us in our linkage with a
full scale tax shift agenda. And after covering those
common heritage activities I want to look at how the tax
shift agenda could be a really strong component in a mass
local to global movement building.
Corporate Planet, subtitled Ecology and Politics in
the Age of Globalization, is a quite impressive work that
has just been put out by the Sierra Club. It looks at how
the current form of development world-wide, through the
World Bank, is using massive amounts of ground rent,
privatized through oil resources, to fund development
policies that exclude people from the heritage of the land
and resource base. For instance, one is a World Bank
funded project for corporations (this always seems to
get directed to corporations, not to the people themselves)
to build a dam in Japan which displaced 30,000 rice
farmers.
Another one was building roads for hacienda owners
in Central America for cotton export, which displaced
massive amounts of peasants. They are pushed into the rain
forest, and they chop down the rain forest, and then that
land is used for export for beef products. And again they
are left basically homeless. Logging projects in Africa
displaced 200,000 people who were dependent on forests for
their livelihood.
This form of development policy has been pervasive.
We can look back to 1948 in North Dakota. At that time
there was probably the only Indian Tribe who were
sustainably farming along the Missouri River bottom. The
Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation
decided to put a number of dams on the Missouri River. One
they placed right outside of the reservation. Reservations
are not national parks for native peoples; they are
sovereign territory arranged by treaty. The dam was built,
and the dam flooded that whole river bottom and displaced
those 1500 native Americans who then went into poverty and
welfare conditions.
The sequel to this 1948 story was in 1991. One of
the children born in a tarpaper shack to the displaced
Indians, after the flooding of their ancestral territory,
went from poverty to graduating from Stanford to law school
at Yale. His name is Raymond Cross and in 1991 he found
himself leading the case for a settlement for the people
who were displaced in 1948. In 1991 he won the case and a
$149.5 million settlement for their lands.
Maurice Strong is a board member of corporations that
hold massive amounts of land holdings in New Mexico. He
was in charge of major development and privitization of
hydro-power and other natural resources in Canada and went
on to become a major mover and shaker for the past twenty
years within the United Nations system. He was chair of
the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. His vested
interest in land is quite pervasive. His companies
displaced indigineous peoples in Central America to
create lands for tourist development.
One of Strong's most recent acquisitions was that
of a major North American aquifer in Colorado, and his
intention then was to sell water resources to Denver. The
local communities who formerly were in charge of that
aquifer had to raise taxes in order to raise legal funds to
fight this corporate grab of their water which previously
was a common heritage resource used for those communities.
So is it any wonder that in the "Rio Plus Five" 1997
conference at the U.N. the results came in that there has
been really no progress in sustainable development efforts
in the past five years. We have gone backwards. We have
an opportunity here to look very clearly at land tenure,
taxation and overall financing for development policy,
local to global, to set us on a new track.
I want to tell you about the Seed Satyagraha movement
in India. Imagine that you were growing heirloom tomatoes
in the backyard of your homestead, that the seeds had been
passed on for generations, and those seeds were really well
matched to the conditions in your particular land. Imagine
then that somebody from a thousand miles away came and took
the tomato and took that seed and analyzed the genetic DNA
patterns of the seed, and then claimed it as the property
rights for a particular corporation. And they said that
you were no longer allowed to grow your tomatoes. And they
then tried to sell you other seeds that would not reproduce
and you would no longer have seeds, generation after
generation, to keep growing with.
That is essentially what has been happening
throughout the Third World with the privitization of
intellectual property rights to the genetic code of life
itself. While this was happening there were also massive
public relations campaigns throughout India by the Cargill
Corporation to show the farmers how advantageous it was to
buy their seeds, that they could have greater crops with
the new seeds, though of course it came with a certain
chemical and pesticide base. Because of the glitz of the
public relations, of the video tapes and the glossy
literature, many of the Indian farmers went along with this
and started buying these seeds from Cargill, and started
neglecting their traditional seeds that they had used for
eons of time.
But when the farmers realized after a very short
period of time that these seeds could not produce any more
seeds, and they would forever have to buy more seeds, they
began to organize and rise in protest. The ten million
plus united farmers in India went to the head office and
the production center for Cargill Seeds with their crowbars
and brick by brick took apart the building. (That form of
protest idea started with comments from Carla Hills, who
was our Trade Representative to the South, saying that
our corporations would pry open the Southern Hemisphere
markets with crowbars.)
There seems to be no end to the efforts to privatize
common heritage resources and to find ways to control
genetic structure. For instance, the "Terminator"
technology can splice a gene into any particular seed so
that that seed cannot reproduce. You have to keep
buying and buying the seed. This is just one more example
of the global reach of the vested interest of the very few.
At this point the statistic is that 348 multi-billioners
have now accumulated more wealth than 2.5 billion people.
It is hard to grasp.
We are hopefully nearing the end of this monopoly game.
And this is what it looks like when you play monopoly. You
see all the pieces get into the hands of one person. We
are in the greedy grasp of the few right now, and it is
just further igniting the people's movements local to
global all over the planet to get very clear about the
peoples' agenda that is going to create a massive shift in
terms of ownership and control of the earth's resources.
I see this shift coming from a number of places. The
Indian farmers now have a movement to establish collective
intellectual property rights, to affirm property rights
that have been vested in the community for eons of time and
the experience that the community has had in developing
their own sustainably based technology and seed resources.
There is the Biodiversity Convention which affirms the
human right to the rich variety of genetic resources of the
planet that our United States government has been vetoing
for many years. Indian scientist Vandana Shiva is a strong
voice for the Biodiversity Convention, portions of that are
being adopted as legal guidelines, despite the lack of full
ratification.
Then we have The Seventh Generation Act. That is a
full cost accounting bill being introduced by a Canadian
Member of Parliament from Ontario, Joe Jordan. In this we
are seeing some common heritage perspectives working their
way into legal formatting. We have the call by Ward
Morehouse for a widespread debate on the theme of democracy
and property rights, which I think is going to get us into
the issue of what are the democratic rights to land; we
need to base democracy on the right to the earth itself.
I think the best manifesto for common heritage,
combining the private individual and the common rights to
earth, was put out by the International Union for Land
Value Taxation and Free Trade in 1948. It is printed on
the inside of the back cover of my little booklet,
"Financing Planet Management," which is available from
Schalkenbach Foundation. This is the 50th year of that
wonderfully profound and extremely relevant International
Declaration on Individual and Common Rights to Earth. We
should really be using it and getting it broadly published
and distributed. It is just as relevant now as it was in
1948, and is a strong backbone for a lot of the work that
our movement is doing.
This year is also the 50th year of the anniversary of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so we could also
use this year to affirm human rights to the earth. You
might want to set aside December 10, which is the exact
date for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and
have some sort of event on that day where we can say that
the next step in universal human rights is declaring the
right to the planet itself.
I am grateful that Hanno Beck urged me to attend the
Tax Shift conference in Washington, D.C. this past April.
To me, it was the most optimistic sign of the potential for
our movement developing a massive strength that I have
seen at any time probably in the last several years. The
tax shifters conference was two days long, sponsored by
Redefining Progress and the Center for a Sustainable
Economy.
The context is developing where environmentalists
have come to understand that to have the strong support of
the middle classes, they have to have a concern about
wages, and to have a base in low income communities there
also must be a concern for environmental justice, and
a way of building support by business as well. So they saw
a way to build a broad range of support by shifting from a
bureaucratic command control approach to environmental
restoration to a market approach through tax incentives.
This is a really major shift for
environmentalists to be making, and it moves them from
being a net drain on government resources to increasing the
tax base for government. Because there is a strong movement
to decrease rather than increase the size of government,
environmentalists then realized that they had to have a
revenue neutral tax shift, and so they combined the
objectives of economic justice with that of supporting
legitimate business enterprise by advocating reductions in
income, payroll and business taxes. This is certainly a
Georgist concept, and though there was not a strong speaker
for land value or site value taxation at the Tax Shift
conference, Alan Durning's book was given to all conference
participants.
Andrew Hoerner of the Center for a Sustainable Economy
(CSE) has done an exhaustive survey of over 400 ecotax
policies already in place throughout the fifty states. Now
they are gleaning the best practices from those 400
policies. CSE has sent to me the work they have done for
Pennsylvania, asking me to review that. They are very
interested in Pennsylvania's work with the land value tax
because some are coming to see that the land value tax is a
very important tax shift policy that they need to get well
versed in and up to speed on.
CSE is considering focusing on and targeting
Pennsylvania for some of their tax shift efforts because
of our two-rate land value tax efforts in the 16 cities
there. So I think organizing-wise, all of you should get
hold of the ecotax research and find out what ecotaxes are
already in place in your state, and network with these
policy institutes that are talking about the
tax shift
.
There were about 70 people at Tax Shift and they
represented about 50 different organizations. Worldwatch
and many other major DC think tanks had sent
representatives.
Another field that is related that I only recently
found out about is the financing for development dialogue.
The background to this is that the G-77 (the Group of 77
developing countries, as juxtaposed to the developed
countries, G-8 -- the 8th being Russia) has called for a
wide dialogue within the UN system and within the UN
members on the theme of "Financing for Development" which
they perceive is a real weak point coming out of Agenda 21
from the Rio Earth Summit. They are realizing that there
are lots of holes in current development theory and that
the development approach of the World Bank and the Bretton
Woods institutions is not working to irradicate poverty
but is in fact exacerbating the problem.
The invitation has gone out on many levels to join
in and link with this dialogue on the best practices for
innovative funding sources, and how can we mobilize domestic resources for
development. The United
States is coming strongly in on this. I first heard about
it at a briefing at the UN Mission in New York by David
Hale, who is President of U.S. AID. We have also our
Treasury Department and other agencies of the U.S.
government who are invited. There will be input that you
can read on their web site, and they will have meetings on
the theme of financing for development for the next two
years.
Another place for us to plug in on that dialogue is
the United Citizens Network for Sustainable Development,
which is probably one of the strongest networks connecting
the Non-Governmental Organizations movement of the UN down
to the grassroots level in terms of implementing Agenda 21.
The Millennium Peoples Assembly Network (MPAN) is yet
another opportunity, and I think a very great one, for our
movement to really grow exponientially. This effort is
very visionary yet it has mass mobilization potential.
Last fall UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, in
looking ahead to the year 2000, announced that the UN is
planning for the General Assembly to have its Millennium
Assembly and also a Millennium Summit of heads of state. At
that time Annan also put forth the call for Millennium
Peoples Assemblies worldwide, local to global, regional,
national, and continental. This call for Millennium
People's Assembly, also being called a Millennium NGO
Forum, has mobilized a movement that has been building for
20 years to establish a permanent Global People's Assembly.
During this decade there have been several UN
sponsored global conferences such as the Cairo Summit on
Population, the Copenhagen Summit on Social Development
(where our NGO first began to participate), the Istanbul
Habitat II Summit, and others. At these global conferences,
the nation states have their meetings and they develop
their agendas by consensus, word by word, phrase by phrase.
At the Istanbul one, which I participated in, 183 nation
states hammered out by consensus an impressive 165 page
document.
Most inspiring to us, and I had talked about this
at previous conferences, is the Land Access section of the
Habitat II agenda, which calls for land value recapture,
and is a pretty thorough going 18-point Georgist policy
approach that we need to really keep working with, and get
that pushed for implementation.
Also, at these global conferences, the people all
come together and they form their own people's agendas.
There were 35,000 people at Rio, 50,000 at the Beijing
Women's conference and at Istabul about 18,000 were
assembled. Now we are going to take all these agendas, get
them very clear, and then work to build a massive local to
global peoples movement to break through the monopoly
control of the corporations that are bent on ruling the
planet. (To get an excellent perspective on this take a
look through David Korten's book, When Corporations Rule
the World.)
I see the Georgist agenda is already coming to
the forefront in the agenda that is being developed. I
invite you to become a part of the leadership of this
movement for worldwide local to global peoples
assemblies so that we will be able to build an agenda
process that is going to produce a true global people's
document and blueprint for the future. So please consider
joining with us in New York for the Millennium NGO Forum
and Peoples Assembly in the year 2000.
I hope I have given you some ideas about ways to keep
our movement on the move.
This article appeared earlier at the
Common Ground-U.S.A.
web site.
