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350.org
Anti-Poverty Campaigners Cheer Spain-Brazil-South Africa Plan to Tax the Grotesquely Rich
"People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on," said one supporter of the new initiative. "It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
Jul 01, 2025
A new plan backed by the governments of Spain, Brazil, and South Africa to tax the fortunes of the uber-rich drew hearty cheers from anti-poverty campaigners, environmental activists, and unions when it was announced on Tuesday.
As described in an announcement by the Spanish government, the initiative aims to create coordination between governments on the taxation of high-net-worth individuals to ensure they are not shuffling money abroad to avoid proper taxation.
"The proposal aims to incentivize and guide different countries to join the initiative and address policy, administrative, and data deficiencies, ensuring that high-net-worth individuals are taxed more efficiently in line with their wealth," the Spanish government explained. "To achieve this, it is necessary to foster international cooperation in multilateral forums to promote and facilitate the implementation of evidence-based reforms and ongoing experiences regarding the taxation of large fortunes in different countries."
The plan—crafted by the governments of Spain and Brazil and presented at the United Nations' Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development being held in the Spanish city of Seville—was quickly praised by an assortment of international nonprofit organizations as an essential tool for tackling global wealth inequality.
Kate Blagojevic, associate director for Europe campaigns for environmental the advocacy group 350.org, described it as "a bold move by Spain and Brazil" that she said could provide funding for clean energy investments around the world, including in countries that lack the resources to make such investments.
"We want more countries to join this coalition so that billionaires and multi-millionaires help to foot the bill for the climate damage they have caused and decrease the huge gap between the rich and the poorest," she said, while also calling for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to sign on.
Susana Ruiz, the tax justice policy lead at the anti-poverty organization Oxfam, emphasized that international coordination on taxation of high-worth individuals was a serious proposal to address a crisis in global democracy, which she said was being undermined by the corrupting influence of vast sums of money being held by a tiny number of people.
"This extreme inequality is being driven by a financial system that puts the interests of a wealthy few above everyone else," she said. "This concentration of wealth is blocking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and keeping over three billion people living in poverty: over half of poor countries are spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare or education."
Fred Njehu, the global political lead for Greenpeace’s Fair Share campaign, deemed the tax plan essential at a time when nations are behind their renewable energy goals and when wealthy elites such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos can go all-out for a lavish three-day wedding in Venice.
"Financing is urgently needed for climate action and public services, not for polluting space travel and luxury weddings," he said. "This new coalition of governments working to tax the super-rich adds to the growing global momentum to make the world’s wealthiest pay their fair share. People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on. It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
And Leo Hyde, the campaigns and media coordinator at the Public Services International union, praised the plan and said that was the result of years' worth of advocacy by unions and other organizations.
"The initiative aims to ensure a progressive and efficient global tax system with the aim of reducing social inequality," he said. "This builds directly on years of union-led tax justice campaigning that has already yielded significant victories, including the OECD global minimum corporate tax, Australia's public country-by-country reporting initiatives, and the ongoing UN tax treaty negotiations."
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G7 Leaders Blasted for 'Morally Indefensible' Failure on Crises of War, Poverty, and Climate
Amid interlocking catastrophes, the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations were told they "cannot retreat and hide."
Jun 18, 2025
The Group of Seven Leaders' Summit concluded in Canada on Tuesday with joint statements on artificial intelligence, critical minerals supply chains, foreign interference, quantum innovation, transnational crime, and wildfires, but campaigners called out attendees for failing to "take collective action to end conflicts, address climate change, and reduce poverty and inequality."
Although U.S. President Donald Trump bailed early, representatives from the other G7 member countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—and the European Union gathered in Kananaskis, Alberta from Sunday to Tuesday, with appearances by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
"The summit fell short of delivering the leadership the world needs," the global advocacy group Oxfam said in a lengthy statement after the meeting ended. "Nowhere was this more apparent than in how this G7 totally missed its chance to exert any meaningful pressure toward peace in the Middle East."
"Even its call for a de-escalation between Israel and Iran, which is desperately needed, was corrupted by geo-political partiality and bias," the group continued, calling for "an immediate end to hostilities in the region," including "Israel's relentless assault on Gaza."
"With a planned 28% reduction by 2026 compared to 2024, these cuts are not just a policy failure but put the lives of millions of people at risk, especially those already facing hunger, poverty, and ever-worsening effects of climate change."
Unlike the 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis, "where leaders committed to an Africa Action Plan and development cooperation," G7 leaders are now "pursuing the largest aid cuts in its history," Oxfam also noted. "With a planned 28% reduction by 2026 compared to 2024, these cuts are not just a policy failure but put the lives of millions of people at risk, especially those already facing hunger, poverty, and ever-worsening effects of climate change."
"In a world grappling with war, rising inequality, food insecurity, and climate breakdown," Oxfam declared, "the G7's retreat from responsibility is not only morally indefensible but also strategically short-sighted."
Climate campaigners also took aim at summit attendees, with Greenpeace International's Tracy Carty saying Tuesday that "as G7 leaders grapple with how to de-escalate multiple conflicts they can ill afford to ignore another threat to global stability—the worsening climate emergency."
"But even before the latest intensification in the Middle East, the climate had already been sidelined, as the G7—under Canada's leadership—tiptoed around Trump's climate denialism," Carty continued. "The leaders of these nations—among the most responsible for global emissions—cannot retreat and hide."
"The G7 must urgently work towards bold action to cut emissions, hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and ensure big polluters pay their fair share for the climate damage already unfolding across the globe," she asserted.
Her colleague at Greenpeace Canada, Keith Stewart, pointed out that "Canada is literally a country on fire, but despite wanting to discuss an improved joint response to wildfires, it allowed the summit to end with a statement on the issue that included no mention of tackling the climate crisis fueling the latest disaster."
📣This year's #G7Summit ended with clean energy & fossil fuel subsidy reform missing from final statements. Climate received only a passing reference in the Chair’s statement.IISD's @patriciafuller.bsky.social stresses previous climate commitments remain on the books. 👇 www.iisd.org/articles/sta...
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— IISD Energy (@energy.iisd.org) June 17, 2025 at 9:49 PM
Amara Possian, 350.org's Canada team lead, targeted Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, arguing that "as one of the world's richest, most polluting countries, Canada has a responsibility to lead on climate justice" and he "should use the G7 presidency to raise the bar."
Specifically, "to do our fair share, Canada must triple climate finance through grants, cancel Global South debt, make polluters and billionaires pay, and end trade rules that block climate action," Possian said. "This is a defining test of Canada's commitment to long-term security and prosperity."
350.org leaders from Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean also took aim at G7 leaders who "missed a crucial opportunity to lead on climate and to stand up against fossil fuel interests and the Trump administration."
U.S. senior policy analyst JL Andrepont said that "Trump's early exit from the G7 summit in Canada is part of a continued effort to remove our leadership and commitments from the world stage. We cannot move forward quickly enough on the needed clean, just energy transition with a U.S. government hostile to the very concept of the climate crisis and the readily available tools necessary to fight it—justly sourced and implemented, low-cost wind and solar."
"The rest of the planet must step forward in our absence to keep the fight to end the fossil fuel era going," Andrepont added. "Unfortunately, G7 leaders followed in Trump's footsteps and ended the meeting pretending climate change doesn't exist. Our people and our planet deserve better."
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'Batsh*t Crazy' Trump Tariffs Should Be Seen as $7,000 Tax Hike on Workers, Says Economist
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to "give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis."
Apr 03, 2025
As stocks "nosedived" on Thursday, economists, policymakers, and campaigners around the world continued to warn about the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war, which includes a 10% universal tariff for imports and steeper duties—that he claims are "reciprocal"—for dozens of countries, set to take effect over the next week.
"This is how you sabotage the world's economic engine while claiming to supercharge it," wrote Nigel Green, CEO of the international financial consultancy deVere Group. "Trump is blowing up the post-war system that made the U.S. and the world more prosperous, and he's doing it with reckless confidence."
As Bloomberg detailed after the president's "Liberation Day" remarks from the White House Rose Garden:
China's cumulative tariff rate of 54% includes both the 20% duty already charged earlier this year, added to the 34% levy calculated as part of Trump's so-called reciprocal plan, according to people familiar with the matter. The European Union's rate is 20% and Vietnam's is 46%, White House documents showed. Other nations slapped with larger tariffs include Japan with 24%, South Korea with 25%, India with 26%, Cambodia with 49%, and Taiwan with 32%.
In Europe on Thursday, "the regional Stoxx 600 index provisionally ended down around 2.7%," while "the U.K.'s FTSE 100 was down 1.6%, with France's CAC 40 and Germany's DAX posting deeper losses of 3.3% and 3.1%, respectively," according to CNBC.
In the United States, CNBCreported, "the broad market index dropped 4%, putting it on track for its worst day since September 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,200 points, or 3%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%. The slide across equities was broad, with decliners at the New York Stock Exchange outnumbering advancers by 6-to-1."
American exceptionalism.
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— Justin Wolfers ( @justinwolfers.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 12:14 PM
However, as Economic Policy Institute (EPI) chief economist Josh Bivens noted last week, "because most households depend overwhelmingly on wages from work as their primary source of income and not returns from wealth-holding, the stock market tells us nothing about these households' economic situations."
And Trump's tariffs are expected to hit U.S. households hard, as the cost of his taxes on imports are passed on to consumers.
"Tariffs can be a legitimate and useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise," Bivens and EPI senior economist Adam Hersh stressed in a Thursday statement—which also called out Trump for mischaracterizing one of the think tank's 2022 analyses.
"Further, the second Trump administration's rationale, parameters, and timeline for tariffs have been ever-shifting," Bivens and Hersh continued. "As the original post cited by the administration argues, tariffs should not be a goal unto themselves, but a strategic tool to pair with other efforts to restore American competitiveness in narrowly targeted industrial sectors."
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to "give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis, which comes to $7,000 per household," warned Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder and senior economist Dean Baker. "And this tax hike will primarily hit moderate and middle-income families. Trump's taxes go easy on the rich, who spend a smaller share of their income on imported goods."
Baker—like various other economists and journalists—also took aim at Trump's claims that the tariffs are reciprocal, explaining:
Trump's team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country's tariff on goods imported from the U.S.
Trump's method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president. And apparently none of his economic advisers has the courage and integrity to set him straight or to resign.
However, outside Trump's administration, the intense criticism continued to mount, including from groups focused on combating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which also endangers the global economy.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and Campaigns at 350.org, said Thursday that "Trump's tariffs won't slow the global energy transition—they'll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans."
"Despite his claims he 'gets' economic policy, his record tells a different story: Tariffs are tanking U.S. stocks and fueling inflation," Sieber added. "The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the U.S. and drive up costs for American consumers."
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International, similarly emphasized that "Trump's tariffs will hurt working families first and foremost, raising costs for essentials we depend on and threatening to plunge the U.S. economy into a recession. Though Trump pretends to care about the cost of living for ordinary people, his real loyalties lie with his fossil fuel industry donors."
"If he actually cared about energy affordability, he would stop bullying other countries into buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), which boosts the fossil fuel industry's profits, but results in increased prices for domestic consumers and pushes us further toward climate catastrophe," she asserted. "The one step countries can take to hit Trump where it hurts most is wean off their dependency on fossil fuels from the United States."
The impact of Trump's new levies won't be limited to working-class people in the United States. Nick Dearden, director of U.K.-based Global Justice Now, pointed out that "Trump has set light to the global economy and unleashed a world of pain, not least on a group of developing countries that will suffer tremendous impoverishment as a result of his punitive tariffs."
"All those affected must come together and stand up to this bully by building a very different international economy that promotes the interests of ordinary people rather than the oligarchs standing behind Trump," he argued. "For all its scraping and crawling, the U.K. got no special treatment here, and the government should learn this lesson fast: They need to stop giving away our rights and protections in a futile effort to appease Donald Trump."
Leaders in the United States are also encouraging resistance to Trump. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that "this week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won't understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That's because they don't. They aren't designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool."
Murphy made the case that "the tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it's a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears."
"But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs," he added, referring to a
resolution that would undo levies on Canadian imports. "The people still have the power."
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