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Webster G. Tarpley
www.TARPLEY.net
March 16, 2010
The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum worldwide, thanks above all to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from all but certain defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card, which they have dubbed the Robin Hood Tax.
If the Labour Party left succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate House and Senate Democrats following the Labour Party example and embracing the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax as a means of getting some populist credibility and viability for November.
The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their demagogic Tea Party camouflage. The Obama-Summers-Geithner gang will also be put into a bind: will they oppose a measure demanded by their own Congressional Democrats? I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has now come.
If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring New Labour back from the dead, it can also defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and the reactionary Republicans here in the US, while forcing Obama to go along. It is time to make this a world-wide campaign to force the bankers to pay for the world economic depression they have created.
For weeks, British public opinion polls have been unanimous in finding that Gordon Brown and the Labour Party were doomed to succumb before the triumphal march of the reactionary Tories of David Cameron. But in the past month or two, the situation has begun to change, with at least one poll showing the Tories only ahead by a couple of percentage points, meaning that a Conservative Party victory is now in doubt, and a hung parliament with no clear majority for anyone a real possibility.
E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post is trying to portray Gordon Brown as a new version of “Giv’em Hell” Harry Truman. But we should remember that Gordon Brown is the politician who inaugurated the financial bailout fad on a world scale in 2007 when he pumped British taxpayer money into the bankrupt hulk of Northern Rock, followed by the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank, and the rest of the bankrupt City of London.
So far, Gordon Brown has only flirted with the Robin Hood tax from a distance. So it is not likely that the turnaround has anything to do with Gordon Brown, although widespread fear of draconian cuts in the social safety net under the Tories is playing a major role.
