Proposta de ONGs, e do governo brasileiro, para a implementação de uma taxa financeira global sobre os megarricos

Proposta de ONGs, e do governo brasileiro, para a implementação de uma taxa financeira global sobre os megarricos

 Transcrevendo:

Wednesday, 10 July 2024

Dear G20 Leaders,

We, the undersigned former Heads of State and Government of G20 and higher-

income countries, write to ask for your leadership to back the Brazilian G20

presidency’s proposal for a new global deal to tax the world’s ultra-rich

individuals.

We, as former leaders, recognize a rare strategic opportunity when we see one.

Taxes are the foundation of a civilized, industrious, and prosperous society. Yet our

time is one in which the ultra-rich across the world pay a lower tax rate than

teachers and cleaners. Billionaires, globally, are paying a tax rate equivalent to less

than 0.5% of their wealth. Trillions of dollars that could have been productively

invested in communities, education, health, and infrastructure have instead been

unproductively accumulated by the ultra-wealthy.

Extreme inequality follows. In G20 countries, the share of income of the top 1% of

earners has risen by 45% over four decades while top tax rates on their incomes

were cut by roughly a third. That too many people feel the social contract is broken

and their democracies have left them behind is all too understandable.

We know you know this. But our time is also one of promise, and Brazil’s G20

proposal underlines the opportunity to write a new story about taxation for the

first time in a generation.

We commend governments providing leadership and championing bold proposals

to address inequality. Consider President Biden’s proposed billionaire income tax,

that sets a global example. Across the world and political spectrum, taxing the

ultra-rich enjoys consistent popular support, even among the ultra-rich

themselves. The leadership of the G20 was vital to securing a global deal for a

minimum tax on corporations. Now it’s time to do the same for the ultra-rich.

Every government must tax the ultra-rich. Every country can act. National action

is indispensable. We need to tax billionaires’ income in every country.

But national action alone can only go so far. Global capital does not respect national

borders. Tax avoidance and evasion by the ultra-rich succeeds when governments

fail to work together. We need global cooperation.

That is why the proposal set out by President Lula and the Brazilian G20

presidency for a new global deal for taxing the world’s ultra-rich individuals is

strategic and necessary.Now is the time to foster cooperation for a shared standard so every billionaire on

earth is paying a minimum level of their income in tax. We commend the

governments of France, South Africa and other countries supporting this much-

needed G20 proposal, and join the distinguished economists who champion it.

A new global deal to tax the ultra-rich is, crucially, in the service of strengthening

national efforts to ensure the ultra-rich cannot evade domestic taxation efforts. It

would reduce inequality and raise trillions of dollars necessary for investments in

industrial policy and a just transition.

A global deal to tax the ultra-rich would be a shot in the arm for multilateralism:

proving that governments can come together for the common good, especially at a

time of fractured North-South solidarity in a decade that has seen a pandemic and

war. It would build upon the G20 2021 minimum global corporate tax deal agreed

to by 136 countries.

And a global deal would also help our economies to be more productive and

resilient in the face of shocks. It must be designed in a manner that eases the tax

burden on the working classes; that is ambitious enough to redress inequality; and

that respects each country’s own policy choices for taxation.

We know, first-hand, the reality of political office and the constraints of leadership

– including the pressures placed upon you. Rare is a proposal that asks us as

former leaders to rally in unity – and that we recognize as politically possible. This,

clearly, is one.

Dear G20 leaders – you lead the world’s most powerful economies and in this time

of political and economic malaise, you can be the shepherds of progress and

change. We ask that you offer the world leadership for a new consensus on

taxation. We stand ready to support you on this agenda.

Sincerely yours,

(...)

============

Comentário PRA: Não vai funcionar. OK, vamos elaborar.

Primeiro problema:  Como separar os países do G20 entre "higher-income countries" e os que não o são? 

    China, por exemplo, tem o segundo maior PIB do mundo, mas uma renda per capita média, não alta, e tem o maior número de bilionários, depois dos EUA (mas crescendo ao triplo da velocidade da acumulação de riqueza). O Brasil é a oitava maior economia do mundo, mas com uma renda per capita estagnada há décadas.

Segundo problema: fazer a lista dos megarricos, um punhado apenas de trilionários, e alguns milhares de bilionários. Quem entra, quem fica de fora?

Terceiro problema: identificar a riqueza líquida. Ou se pretende liquidar ações, mansões, iates, carros de luxo, dinheiro aplicado em investimentos financeiros (em países pobres) ou até em arte?

Quarto problema: Quem implementa o esquema? A ONU, o FMI, o BIS, o próprio G20?

Quinto problema: Como identificar os "alvos" da suposta bonança financeira? Fazer uma listinha de miseráveis, aos quais seria facultado um cartão de crédito para consumo?

Sexto problema: Taxar superricos e distribuir o dinheiro – como se isso fosse fácil ou possível – vai realmente acabar com a miséria no mundo, ou criar mais alguns "ricos" nos canais de distribuição, implementação e controle?

 

Podem até assinar a declaração no Rio de Janeiro, mas sua implementação, se algum dia acontecer, levará anos. Países decentes terão enriquecido no meio do caminho, com a globalização econômica, não com o ilusório Brics ou Sul Global.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 21 julho 2024

ONGs nem sempre sao beneficas, e podem causar muito mal - book review

Patrice C. McMahon. The NGO Game: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond.  

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. 238 pp. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-0923-4; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5017-0924-1.

Reviewed by Paul Stubbs (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb)
Published on H-Diplo (December, 2017)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=50472

Patrice C. McMahon’s The NGO Game articulates a very clear and consistent thesis that in postconflict environments and beyond, although nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been seen as a kind of magic bullet fostering sustainable peace and development, their impact has been much exaggerated. At times, McMahon goes further to suggest that the unintended consequences of their activities result in them actually doing more harm than good on the ground. She is particularly concerned with the distorting influence which international NGOs have on local organizations whose growing numbers are a product more of instrumentalized relations than of burgeoning civil society. A general conclusion is, therefore, that the international community’s faith in NGOs as a kind of peacebuilding panacea, primarily by Western donors, is essentially misplaced and even akin to a form of colonialism.

Most of the empirical evidence for this is drawn from the author’s own extended, if intermittent, fieldwork, over a long period of time, roughly 2000 to 2011, in Bosnia-Herzegovina (which throughout the author calls Bosnia) and Kosovo, presented in chapters 3 and 4 of the book, respectively. In addition, reference is made in the introductory chapter to the author’s fieldwork in Vietnam and Cambodia. Throughout the book, and particularly in the concluding chapter, the author uses work by others on, inter alia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, East Timor, Libya, Haiti, and postcommunist Russia.    

McMahon in some ways is faced with a dilemma, in that when she began her work on NGOs in peacebuilding, the literature was generally positive about their impact, although lacking detailed empirical validation. However, by the time she wrote the book, an opposite orthodoxy, a kind of complete volte face as it were, was in place, substituting for a more nuanced and complex understanding of the diverse impacts of diverse NGOs in different places at different times. In a moment of reflexivity, the author notes that her own initial discussion of NGOs in Mostar was “incomplete and somewhat misleading” (p. 89), although no direct reference is provided to the text or texts in which this supposed error is manifest. This does not lead McMahon to embrace the open and contradictory roles of NGOs, individually and collectively, over time, within postconflict environments. Instead, she repeats frequently what I want to term the new common sense about their negative impacts, sometimes giving the book an air of superficiality.

Although there is a general agreement that research on peacebuilding and postconflict reconstruction needs to be multidisciplinary,[1] the book appears to be focused primarily within the discipline of international relations (IR). In fairness, an early criticism in the book regarding the statist bias of IR and the concomitant failure to address the role of NGOs and other nonstate actors in international politics leads to McMahon, rightly in my view, suggesting that “IR scholars have a long way to go to catch up with their peers in sociology, anthropology, and even comparative politics, who have all interrogated NGOs more thoroughly” (p. 19). Unfortunately, subsequent reference to, in particular, anthropological work which is extremely well placed to provide a more nuanced account and to address the gap between what NGOs say they do and what they actually do on the ground, is rather haphazard, however. A great deal of important anthropological work on realities in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina by Čarna Brković, Andrew Gilbert, Elisa Helms, Azra Hromadžić, Stef Jansen, and Larisa Kurtović, to name a few, for example, is entirely absent.[2]

The author’s invoking, throughout the book, of “institutionalism” as a key conceptual lens through which to address the roles of NGOs in peacebuilding is problematic. McMahon does not explain which type of institutional theory is being preferred (at different moments, rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and discursive institutionalism seem to be influential). She also does not explain how to conceptualize the relationship between individual agency, organizational form, and macro-level power structures in “determining” NGO practices.

At times, it is not clear whether it is the faith in NGOs as a quick, effective and, above all, cheap substitute for direct, long-term engagement in postconflict reconstruction by international (read Western) intergovernmental and bilateral actors which is the main target of McMahon’s criticism or, rather, any attempt to intervene from outside, through the establishment of protectorates or semi-protectorates. The best parts of the book, in my view, are those which address the complex, and ever lengthening, chains of relations between different agencies and the complex, and often competing, roles of the United Nations and its agencies, the European Union, the World Bank, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and other key actors in aid and development. l would argue that what Mark Duffield termed a new security and development agenda, linking humanitarianism, peacebuilding, biopolitical interventions, and forms of social and political engineering “from above” within a developing “Duty to Protect” (D2P) frame is more of an issue than the role of NGOs per se.[3] At the same time, linking the faith in NGOs not only to “liberal peace,” which is discussed in the book, but also to “neoliberal restructurings” and “new public management” approaches, which are not, could also have taken the book in an interesting direction. What if the projectization, NGOization, and, even marketization and subcontracting (for-profit actors, including consultancy companies, are not given enough attention in the book), traced here are part of more general global restructurings?[4]

Regarding McMahon’s sources, I am concerned with the rather uncritical use, at times, of Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts (1993) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Both works tend to reinforce a kind of “West is best” ideology which, in other places, the author is keen to reject. At the same time, Kaplan’s invocation of “ancient ethnic hatreds” in the Balkans is a prime example of what Milica Bakić-Hayden has termed “nested Orientalism.”[5] Thus, McMahon’s work is in danger of negatively comparing supposed “exotic” elsewheres with a mythical “civilized” West, as well as buying into a thesis that Kosovo is at risk in terms of the spread of “radical Islamic ideas” (p. 162). Favorably quoting Huntingdon for his “cogent” analysis in which “future violence” is caused by “issues of identity and culture” (p. 31) is far from an understanding of the causes of the wars of the Yugoslav succession through categories which are not essentialist but which relate to the contested claims of political elites in complex political economies. Following the work of Michael Pugh and, more recently, Karla Koutkova, any simplistic and binary division between “local” and “international” actors and organizations is difficult to accept.[6] While McMahon does recognize the thriving civil society in Kosovo, explored in Howard Clarke’s Civil Resistance in Kosovo (2000), she fails to pay similar attention to a nascent civil society of women’s, student, and artist groups in parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1980s.  

The NGO Game appears to be aimed at US readers (the book is marked by a noticeable US-centrism) who still believe in the panacea of NGOs in international assistance, if such straw persons exist. Unfortunately, as someone deeply involved in activist-oriented research on peacebuilding and on the role of NGOs in the post-Yugoslav space, I may be far from the book’s ideal reader. At the same time, the empirical work charting the rise of NGOs in chapter 2 is very much worth reading and shows the author’s grasp of the shifts which occurred in both the framing and practice of partnerships with nonstate actors by a large number of diverse supranational organizations. The argument in the conclusion of four “gaps” undermining NGO work in conflict environments—the “funding gap,” or the failure of most development assistance to actually reach local actors; the “empowerment gap,” in terms of the false rhetoric of “partnership” with local actors; the “accountability gap,” in terms of the failure to involve end beneficiaries; and the “motivation gap,” in terms of the reluctance of powerful actors to change the status quo—is extremely interesting and could, and perhaps, should have been more central to the book.

Notes:

[1]. See Francisco Ferrandiz and Antonius Robben, eds., Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Peace and Conflict Research: A View from Europe, (Bilbao: University of Deusto, 2007).

[2]. See, for example, Čarna Brković, “Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81, no. 1 (2016); 99-124; Andrew Gilbert, “Legitimacy Matters: Managing the Democratization Paradox of Foreign State-building in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Sudosteuropa 60, no. 4 (2012); 483-96; Elisa Helms, Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women's Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Azra Hromadžić, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Phiadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: 'Normal Lives' and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghan Books, 2015); Larisa Kurtović, “The Strange Life and Death of Democracy Promotion in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Unbribable Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons, ed. Damir Arsenijević (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), 97-102.

[3]. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001).

[4]. Paul Stubbs, “International Non-State Actors and Social Development Policy,” Global Social Policy 3, no. 4 (2003): 319-48.

[5]. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917-31.

[6]. Michael Pugh, “Protectorates and Spoils of Peace: intermestic manipulations of political economy in South-East Europe,” Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (2000); Karla Koutkova, “‘The King is Naked’: Internationality, informality and ko ful statebuilding in Bosnia,” in Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entaglements, ed. Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković, and Vanja Čelebičić (New York: Routledge, 2016), 109-21.

ENGOs, TUNGOs, IPOs, BINGOs e YOUNGOs: nao sabe o que sao? A nova esquerda -

Why Can't the Left Govern?

The Left can win elections. Why can't it run a government?

By 

DANIEL HENNINGER

The Wall Streeet Journal, March 27, 2014

Surveying the fall in support for the governments of Barack Obama, New York City's progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and France's Socialist President François Hollande, a diagnosis of the current crisis begins to emerge: The political left can win elections but it's unable to govern.

Once in office, the left stumbles from fiasco to fiasco. ObamaCare, enacted without a single vote from the opposition party, is an impossible labyrinth of endless complexity. Bill de Blasio's war on charter schools degenerated into an unseemly attack on poor New York minority children. François Hollande's first act in 2012, like a character in a medieval fable, was to order that more tax revenue be squeezed from the French turnips.

Getty Images

Mr. Obama's approval rating is about 43%, Mr. de Blasio's has sunk to 45% after just two months in office, and Mr. Hollande hit the lowest approvals ever recorded in the modern French presidency. The left inevitably says their leaders failed them. The failure looks self-inflicted.

Three European academics asked themselves recently how 19 United Nations summit meetings have been unable to produce a treaty on global warming. Why the cause of climate change has fallen apart is described in "Melting Summits," a paper and cautionary tale just published in the Academy of Management Journal by Elke Schüssler of Germany, Charles Clemens Rüling of France and Bettina Wittneben of the U.K.

No idea in our time has had deeper political support. Al Gore and John Kerry have described disbelievers in global warming as basically idiots—"shoddy scientists" in Mr. Kerry's words. But somehow, an idea with which "no serious scientist disagrees" has gone nowhere as policy. The collapse of the U.N.'s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a meltdown for the ages.

In an interview with the Academy of Management about her paper, Bettina Wittneben of Oxford University, who supports a climate-change treaty and has attended 13 climate meetings, summarized the wheel-spinning: "Sometimes I just find myself shaking my head after talking to participants in recent COPs [the U.N.'s climate meetings]. They'll come back from the meetings simply brimming with enthusiasm about the networking they've done, the contacts they've made, the new ideas about their research they had or the new angles to lobbying they thought of. But ask what progress was made in terms of global policy initiatives, and all you get is a shrug."

Put differently, it's not about doing something serious about global warming. It's really all about them (a virus threatening American conservatism as well). The "them" at the U.N. summits included not just the participating nations but a galaxy of well-financed nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs.

They travel under their own acronyms. The environmentalists are ENGOs, the trade unions are TUNGOs, indigenous peoples are IPOs, business and industry are BINGOs and women, gender and youth groups are YOUNGOs.

These are the left's famous change agents. The authors dryly describe what they actually do as "field maintenance." Instead of being "catalysts for change," they write that "more and more actors find COP participation useful for their purposes, but their activity is increasingly disconnected from the issue of mitigating climate change."

And little wonder. The failed efforts to get the global-warming treaty done reflect the issue's departure from anything practical. It's impossible to read this history of global warming's demise without hearing resonances of ObamaCare's problems.

The text of the climate-change treaty at Copenhagen in 2009 included "thousands of 'brackets,' or alternative wordings." A participant described the puzzle palace: "There are more and more parallel processes, and everything must be negotiated at the same time. The number of . . . negotiation issues has increased and many of these issues . . . are discussed in different places at the same time. . . . Very few people understand the whole thing." Maybe they could just pass it to find out what's in it.

One organization specialist calls this phenomenon "social deadlock." ObamaCare is social deadlock. But the American left keeps doing it. This isn't the 1930s, and smart people on the left might come to grips with the fact that the one-grand-scheme-fits-all compulsion is out of sync with the individualization that technology lets people design into their lives today.

Rather than resolve the complexities of public policy in the world we inhabit, the left's default is to simply acquire power, then cram down what they want to do with one-party votes or by fiat, figuring they can muddle through the wreckage later. Thus the ObamaCare mandates. Thus candidate de Blasio's determination, cheered on by the city's left-wing establishment, to jam all its kids through an antique public-school system. The ObamaCare mandates are a mess, and the war on charter schools is an embarrassment.

Making the unworkable work by executive decree or court-ordered obedience is one way to rule, and maybe they like it that way. But it isn't governing.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Brasil viveu “décadas de isolamento internacional” - Parbleu!

Uau! Dessa eu não sabia: vivíamos isolados do mundo, e ninguém nunca nos disse nada.
Ufa! Ainda bem que nos tiraram da escuridão interior...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida   

Lula receberá prêmio em Nova York15/02/2013 | 19:22

 O ex-presidente Lula será homenageado pela ONG International Crisis Group (ICG) no dia 22 de abril. Na ocasião, ele receberá o prêmio In Pursuit of Peace (Em Busca da Paz) durante um jantar em Nova York. A ONG justifica a vitória de Lula com seus programas sociais, que teriam tirado milhões de brasileiros da miséria, além da política externa praticada em seus oito anos de mandato. O principal objetivo da ONG é a solução de conflitos armados no mundo e, segundo organização, Lula foi responsável por tirar o Brasil de “décadas de isolamento internacional” e ter atuado na redução da fome na África, além de liderar forças de paz no Haiti e ajudar na solução de conflitos internos com países vizinhos.