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Sharing Our Common Heritage via the Tax Shift Agenda

via the Tax Shift Agenda

by 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 di