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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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Commemorating Fall of Fascism in Spain, PM Sánchez Warns Against Musk Political Interference
"Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again."
Jan 09, 2025
Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk's decision to wade into the political battles of several European countries did not go unnoticed by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who used a Wednesday event marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as an opportunity to warn against Musk's recent commentary.
Without naming Musk, Sánchez warned that the billionaire Tesla CEO's leadership of an "international reactionary" movement is a threat "that should challenge all of us who believe in democracy."
The Spanish leader spoke days after Musk—an ally and megadonor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump who he's selected to co-lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency—commented on an article that stated foreign nationals in Catalonia are disproportionately convicted for sexual assault, writing, "Wow" in response.
"Foreign nationals are neither better nor worse than Spanish citizens in terms of criminality," Sánchez said in response to Musk's commentary, following his remarks at the event Wednesday by rebuking the man he referred to as "the richest man on the planet."
He pointed to Musk's recent perceived interference in Germany's upcoming snap elections, which are scheduled for February. Musk has written an op-ed in support of Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration right-wing party that the German domestic intelligence agency has designated a "suspected extremist" group.
"You don't have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco's regime and fear that this regression will be repeated."
One candidate aligned with AfD said last year that Nazi paramilitaries under Adolf Hitler's regime were "not all criminals."
Musk, said the Spanish prime minister on Wednesday, "openly attacks our institutions, stirs up hatred, and openly calls for the support of the heirs of Nazism in Germany's upcoming elections."
"You don't have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco's regime and fear that this regression will be repeated," he said at the commemoration at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. "Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again."
Musk's recent commentary on Spain played on similar narratives to those he's recently pushed in the United Kingdom, attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labour Party leaders for allegedly not being aggressive enough in prosecuting child sexual exploitation cases involving suspects who were originally from Pakistan.
Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have all spoken out against Musk's recent foray into European politics and accused him of spreading disinformation, with Scholz telling one media outlet, "Don't feed the troll."
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Wednesday called on the European Commission to protect its member states against political interference by Musk.
"Either the European Commission applies with the greatest firmness the laws that we have given ourselves to protect our public space, or it does not do so and then it will have to agree to give back the capacity to do so to the E.U. member states," Barrot told France Inter radio. "We have to wake up."
Members of European Parliament on Wednesday called on the European Commission to investigate whether the social media platform X, which Musk owns, can legally promote Musk's posts on the app under the E.U.'s Digital Services Act. Last year, the tech news site Platformer reported the X algorithm has been reconfigured to amplify Musk's comments.
The pressure from MEPs and recent comments from European leaders came as Musk prepared to host a livestream conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X Thursday.
"I don't understand why people believe that free speech is not affected by the concentration of opinion-making power in the hands of the few," MEP Damian Boeselager of the pan-European Volt party, a candidate for the Bundestag in the German election, told The Guardian. "For me, that has rather illiberal, autocratic tendencies, rather than liberal tendencies, when one voice is so much more powerful than all the others."
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'Unacceptable Tragedy': 10,000+ Migrants Died Trying to Reach Spain This Year
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," said one campaigner.
Dec 26, 2024
More than 10,000 migrants died while trying to reach Spain this year—a more than 50% increase from 2023—according to a Spanish advocacy group's annual report published this week.
The NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) said in its Monitoring the Right to Life—2024 report that 10,457 migrants died en route to Spain via the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea this year. Victims included 1,538 children and adolescents and 421 women. Victims hailed from 28 mostly African nations, with some coming from as far afield as Iraq and Pakistan.
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," the group's founder, Helena Maleno, said in a statement. "More than 10,400 people dead or missing in a single year is an unacceptable tragedy."
Walking Borders said its report "documents the deadliest period on record, with devastating figures averaging 30 deaths a day," up from an average of 18 deaths per day in 2023.
Estás cifras son el horror 👇🏾
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— Helena Maleno Garzón (@helenamaleno.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 12:06 AM
According to the report:
The Atlantic route, with 9,757 deaths, remains the deadliest in the world. Tragedies have increased, especially on the Mauritanian route, consolidating this country as the main departure point to the Canary Islands. The Algerian route, in the Mediterranean, is the second deadliest according to our records, with 517 victims. The Strait of Gibraltar has taken up to 110 lives, and another 73 have been lost on the Alboran route. In addition, 131 vessels were lost, with all persons on board.
Spain's Interior Ministry said earlier this month that, as of December 15, 57,738 migrants successfully reached the country this year by sea, an all-time high.
Walking Borders denounced what it called "the main causes of this increase in shipwrecks and victims," including "the omission of the duty to rescue, the prioritization of migration control over the right to life, the externalization of borders in countries without adequate resources, the inaction and arbitrariness in rescues, [and] the criminalization of social organizations and families."
The group also noted "the situations of extreme vulnerability" that push migrants "to throw themselves into the sea in very precarious conditions."
These include "violence, discrimination, racism, deportations, and sexual violence," as well as "being forced to survive in extreme conditions" prior to departure.
"The number of victims continues to grow and the act of documenting deaths or preserving the victims' memory carries the threat of persecution and stigmatization," the publication states, adding that the dead migrants' voices "can be heard in this report, crying out at their disappearance and death and questioning their fate. They call for justice and an end to impunity."
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