The G20 and Globalization

Source: Corbett Report and Global Research.ca


TRANSCRIPT & SOURCES: 

Last week’s G20 Summit in Cannes, France is already being written off as a bust by the international financiers who were hoping to bolster the fledgling European Financial Stability Fund with international support and to implement a new global financial services tax which they claim will be the long-term solution to the ongoing global economic meltdown.

The leaders of the G20 meeting were left with little more to show for their efforts than photo opportunities, as even their normally upbeat final declaration reflected the sour mood of the public over the economic catastrophe that the G20 leaders themselves helped to bring about:

“Since our last meeting, global recovery has weakened, particularly in advanced countries, leaving unemployment at unacceptable levels,” they wrote in their declaration. “Signs of vulnerabilities are appearing in emerging markets. Increased commodity prices have harmed growth and hit the most vulnerable.” Noting that “Global imbalances persist,” all they could offer was a reaffirmation of their commitment to work together on the problems ahead.

The signal failure of the summit was a distinct lack of resolution of the Greek crisis, as an emergency joint meeting of the EU, IMF and the G20 failed to find any non-EU interest in funding the European Union’s bailout of nations like Greece hammered by the sovereign debt crisis.

The meeting was not without its share of scandal, either. In one incident that has gained considerable attention in light of growing evidence that Israel is preparing a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, the Presidents of the US and France were caught in an unguarded moment speaking about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

In an even more startling development, bestselling author and Bilderberg researcher Daniel Estulin appeared on The Corbett Report last week to reveal the story behind former Greek Prime Minister Papandreou’s abrupt reversal of his own dramatic pledge to give the people of Greece a democratic referendum on the terms of the Eurozone bailout deal. The plan was dropped within 4 days of that announcement, just one day after his meeting with French President Sarkozy ahead of the G20 Summit. According to Estulin’s sources, Papandreou’s abrupt turnabout was the result of a direct threat from Sarkozy and the Eurozone powers.

The news of Papandreou’s reneging on his promise to hold the Greek referendum was met with relief by European leaders and the mainstream economic press, who were well aware that the Greek people were likely to overwhelmingly reject the terms of a Eurozone deal, saddled as it is with punishing austerity measures that will cripple the Greek economy for the foreseeable future.

But perhaps the biggest defeat at the summit from the perspective of the international banking oligarchy was the inability of the G20 leaders to agree on an international framework for the so-called Robin Hood tax, a proposed financial services tax that would supposedly take money from the financial services sector to provide funds for international issues, but which is propounded by a surprising number of billionaires and elite banking insiders.

The financial transaction tax is an idea that has been around since the 1970s, when economist James Tobin argued for a version of it in a Princeton lecture. It would levy a minute tax on all financial transactions and has been proposed as a way of discouraging speculation, regulating derivatives trading, and even funding international initiatives on subjects that are politically untenable at the national level like climate change or even creating a permanent funding mechanism for the United Nations.

Although supposedly meant to penalize the financial services industry, the idea is in fact propounded by many international financiers.

In his 2005 book, George Soros on Globalization, the billionaire financial tycoon advocated for just such a tax, writing:

“The globalization of financial markets has given capital an unfair advantage over other sources of taxation, a tax on financial transactions would redress the balance.” He went on to add, “Collection has to be worldwide, including tax havens.”

In 2009, the globalist think tank the Aspen Institute released a statement supporting such a tax, and arguing that it should even be extended to tax-exempt entities. Signatories to that document included billionaire investor Warren Buffet, the CEOs of IBM, Veridian, and Duke Energy, the former president of the world bank, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, the president of the AFL-CIO, and dozens of other international power players.

They failed to get their wish at this year’s G20 summit, however, as no deal was reached at the summit regarding how such a tax would be implemented, or what it would be used for.

Ultimately, this year’s G20 Summit did not achieve what many of the financiers and bureaucrats behind the current international regulatory framework were looking for, but given that the very viability of the leading example of regional government, the EU, hangs in the balance, expect all of these issues to be pursued even that much more rigorously in similar meetings, summits and conferences in the coming months.