Financial globalization increases economic insecurity and social inequalities. It [...] substitutes a purely speculative logic that expresses nothing more than the interests of multinational corporations and financial markets.
[...]
The total freedom of capital circulation, the existence of tax havens, and the explosion of the volume of speculative transactions have forced governments into a frantic race to win the favor of big investors. Every day, one hundred billion dollars pass through the currency markets in search of instant profits, with no relation to the state of production or to trade in goods and services. The consequences of this state of affairs are the permanent increase of income on capital at the expense of labor, a pervasive economic insecurity, and the growth of poverty.

The social conseqences of these developments are even more severe for dependent countries that are directly affected by the financial crisis and are subjected to the dictates of the IMF’s adjustment plans. Debt service requires governments to lower social service budgets to a minimum and condemn societies to underdevelopment. [...]

Everywhere social rights are called into question. Where there are public retirement systems, workers are asked to replace them by a pension fund mechanism that subjects their own employers to the sole imperatives of immediate profitability, extends the sphere of influence of finance, and persuades citizens of the obsolescence of institutions of solidarity between nations, peoples, and generations.

There is still time to put the brakes on most of these machines for creating inequalities between North and South as well as in the heart of the developed countries themselves. Too often, the argument of inevitability is reinforced by censorship of information about alternatives. Thus international financial institutions and the major media (whose owners are often beneficiaries of globalization) have been silent about the proposal of the American economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin, to tax speculative transactions on currency markets. [...] [T]his money could be used to help struggle against inequalities, to promote education and public health in poor countries, and for food security and sustainable development. Such a measure [...] would sustain a logic of resistance, restore maneuvering room to citizens and national governments, and, most of all, would mean that political, rather than financial considerations are returning to the fore.
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[G]oals:
- to hamper international speculation;
- to tax income on capital;
- to penalize tax havens;
- to prevent the generalization of pension funds;
- to promote transparency in investments in dependant countries;
- to establish a legal framework for banking and financial operations, in order not to penalize further consumers and citizens; the employees of banking institutions can play an important role in overseeing these operations;
- to support the demand for the general annulment of the public debt of dependent countries, and the use of the resources thus freed in behalf of populations and sustainable development, which many call paying off the social and ecological debt.
[...]
- to reconquer space lost by democracy to the sphere of finance,
- to oppose any new abandonment of national sovereignty on the pretext of the "rights" of investors and merchants,
- to create a democratic space at the global level.