UN Conference To Promote Global Taxes; Bush Will Attend
By Cliff Kincaid
CNSNews.com Correspondent
March 12, 2002

(CNSNews.com) - A United Nations conference this month will ask world leaders, including President Bush, to consider global taxes to finance increased foreign aid spending.

The March 18-22 International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, is organized by the U.N. with the participation of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. It will mark the first-ever "summit-level" international conference on global development, and Bush is one of more than fifty world leaders scheduled to attend.

The conference will be preceded by a March 14-16 "global forum" of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) committed to "Financing the Right to Sustainable and Equitable Development."

However, these meetings will take place amid controversy.

A recent study conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and Save the Children of the United Kingdom revealed that some humanitarian assistance was provided to refugees in Africa, mostly children, in exchange for sex.

In Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, workers from international and local NGOs and U.N. agencies, including U.N. Peacekeeping forces, were allegedly "using the very humanitarian aid and services intended to benefit the refugee population as a tool of exploitation," their report said.

Also, according to Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who spent 18 months inside North Korea, foreign aid funneled through the U.N. and intended to feed starving people in North Korea is instead being used for military purposes and to prop up that country's Communist regime.

Nevertheless, the push is on for a global tax to guarantee more foreign aid money.

Although the U.S. Mission to the U.N. claims to have worked to eliminate references to global taxes, the final conference document still recognizes the value of "innovative sources of finance."

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a January 2001 report identifying them as "currency transaction taxes" on a national and global basis which could finance "social development and poverty eradication programs" around the world.

Annan commissioned a High-Level Panel on Financing for Development, headed by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and including former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The panel issued a 72-page report last June proposing an International Tax Organization (ITO) and an "adequate international tax source" for global spending programs.

One idea is the Tobin tax, named after Yale University economist James Tobin, which would target transactions in the foreign currency markets that currently total between $1.2 trillion and $2 trillion a day.

Supporters call the Tobin tax the "Robin Hood tax" because it supposedly taxes the rich nations to benefit the poor. But it would also affect the IRAs, Mutual Funds and pension plans of ordinary Americans that have money invested abroad.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, (D-Ore.) and Senator Paul Wellstone, (D-Minn.), introduced a resolution on April 11, 2000, calling for implementation of Tobin-style taxes. A "Tobin Tax Campaign" in the U.S. also counts the AFL-CIO, Friends of the Earth, and the World Federalist Association as supporters.

While not openly endorsing the Tobin tax, the foreign aid lobby known as InterAction expressed alarm that the Monterrey conference document deleted a reference to "the need" for an ITO, which it described as "a powerful global authority to monitor capital flows ..."

InterAction, a coalition of American-based NGOs that receives $1 million a year in federal funds, includes organizations such as Catholic Relief Services, CARE and Save the Children, which separately receive millions of dollars in additional federal assistance.

In a Feb. 12 news conference, InterAction charged that the Bush Administration's foreign aid budget had "very serious inadequacies."

But Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil has said that, "Over the last 50 years the world has spent an awful large amount of money in the name of development without a great deal of success." A 1995 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the cost of foreign aid for the U.S. over this period has been $2 trillion.

Globally, NGOs have been working with developing countries known as the G-77, the "Group of Seventy-Seven at the United Nations," which retained its original name even though it has grown to 133 nations, including Communist China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

At a G-77 summit in Havana, Cuba, two years ago, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro endorsed the Tobin tax, saying a minimum one percent tax on currency transactions "would permit the creation of a large indispensable fund" of $1 trillion annually to promote Third World development.

French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin supports the Tobin tax, while the German Ministry for Development recently issued a report claiming that its implementation is feasible. The German study said the tax could be imposed by the European Union on foreign currencies, prompting the U.S. to take the same action.