As you probably know (especially you from Sweden and Italy) there were two big political ”meetings”, one in Gothenburg (Sweden) and the other in Genoa (Italy) in 2001. In Gothenburg it was a meeting for theleaders and the ”highest” persons of the EU, and the president of the USA, George W Bush, was there too. The ”conference” in Genoa was a ”G8-meeting”, for the eight richest countries in the world. Both those meetings have unfortunately becomemost ”famous” because of the violent episodes that took place, both in Sweden and Italy. An organisation that was a part of those demonstrations is ATTAC. Because of the violence and the media reports ATTAC has received a quite bad reputation, and many people are kind of ”afraid” of them and other organisations that had members in these towns during the meetings and the protests. But we wanted to know what a kind of organisation ATTAC really is, what they are against and ”pro” and what they really want to change.

An organisation that was a part of those demonstrations is ATTAC. Because of the violence and the media reports ATTAC has received a quite bad reputation, and many people are kind of ”afraid” of them and other organisations that had members in these towns during the meetings and the protests. But we wanted to know what a kind of organisation ATTAC really is, what they are against and ”pro” and what they really want to change.

Cool…We thought, and decided to go and find another view of ATTAC than the more common picture you get from most mass media. And, yeah, this is be the result of our work…

The movement ATTAC

ATTAC is a quite new organisation that was founded in France 11 December, 1998. Today the organisation exist in about 50 countries and totally they are about 80 000 members in different ages and from different social classes. The name ATTAC is a French abbreviation; Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et l’Aide au Citoyen (which means something like the Association for Taxation’s on financial Transactions for the good of the Citizens).

The movement fights for different things in different countries but they all have the same main issues: to oppose the new liberalism, to introduce the Tobintax, to make poor countries free from debt and issues about a fair trade on the agenda.

Trying to make a growing organisation in Europe ATTAC believe that they can easier take advantage of the fact that they are spread in so many places/countries. The goal is to be able to carry through united campaigns and in that way make a bigger impact.

At this time there are many poor countries, and instead of improving schools and hospitals their money goes to pay off their debts. And who gets the money? -The already rich countries of course! The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
ATTAC wants to do something about this and their solution to the problem is: the Tobintax.

Constantly the investors are searching for a better option so their capital continues to grow. That’s why $180 billion every day is changed between different currencies world wide and a big part of the capital is placed short-term so you quickly can remove it.
The Nobel Prize winner, James Tobin, has given a proposal to introduce a tax on 0.05% on the transactions (transferring of money); the Tobintax. The profit of the short-term investments will then become lesser and they hope that the long-term investments will increase so the crisis won’t grow worse.
Attac wants all the tax-incomes to be used for the needs in the third world. But if the Tobintax shall work, a lot of countries have to participate. The struggle continues…

Trial to thoughts…

According to what we have learnt from this work, we both have a quite positive ”view” on ATTAC. It seems to be a movement with good ideas and ideals, and a lot of thinking behind the black, masked ”media facade”. As we have had quite little time to do this work we haven’t been able to find out everything about the organisation, but from what we know we understand that ATTAC seems to fight for good things…

Things that really could make the world a better place for especially people of the 3rd world. It is possible that our opinion would have been different if we were men, forty years older, forty kilos heavier and sitting with $ 5 million in the bank…

Then, we’re happy we aren’t. And we think that those ”big men” ought to be able to offer some thousandth parts of their gigantic capital (they probably wouldn’t even recognise the loss…) if that could give a lot of people in the southern poor countries a better life.

Anyway, of course it is easy for us to sit here and say that, we will not be affected, but we can honestly say that we do anyway hope that if we happened to come into such a situation we would find it OK to give something to make the world a better place.

Common users of this kind of transactions in purpose of getting a growing capital, are most often persons (read men) who never will be able to spend even a part of their money during their lifetimes. The only thing they use most of their money for is to move it between countries and banks to see it growing bigger and bigger, maybe they use half a million sometimes, if they need a new car (the other is actually three years…) or something like that. And don’t you agree with us that they should be able to give just the smallest part of their affluence? If they did so, it’s actually true that the standards for many of the people in the 3rd world would be much better.

© 2003 Freeway
Writers: Sofia Hagström (sp04-31@park.se and, Frida Johansson (sp04-13@park.se)
HTML by: Markus Nolander(te04-18@park.se).