Welcome aboard to new subscriber John Morales. If any reader knows of anyone who should also be a reader, please do put them in touch. This month marks high season for vacationing. When done sans visas, it's tantamount to free travel, akin to free trade, a human interaction that waned before World War II, which ended in the Pacific this month with nuclear destruction. Trade is on the agenda again. If we can evade tariffs, then when the dollar corrects, expect Yanks to travel again, for nonpolitical reasons. Help people feel comfortable with trade. Teach them Georgist economics. Soon, they'll be subscribers, too, and enjoy reading of the progress below. ==================================================================== CONTENTS: 1. News: German to tax carbon? Latest stories at the movement's daily site. 2. Numbers: Inflation, worse than admitted, not fixable by conventional means 3. Good Press: Al Gore for Tax Shift; Other new backers at daily site 4. Movement Progress: UN Habitat's GLTN already wanted 5. Letters: CGO; Lincoln on assessments; RSF poverty film; Aussie news 6. From the Editor: Apology; New format 7. Likable link: South Africa to challenge tax system 8. What You Can Do: Book Drive for Iraq 9. At the Margin: Quips and Quotes 10. Publication affairs: Contributors, About the Georgist News ==================================================================== 1a. News: To keep up to date, see the Progress Report For all the news relevant to movement progress, please visit the Progress Report daily. Read it with your morning coffee! Here are some recent articles full of crucial facts hard to find elsewhere: * Star power is a force that viewers give actors, for better or worse. When it's used to communicate, everyone benefits. --John Cusack: Bypassing the Corporate Media * Who in government misspends the most? Those commissioned to do the worst -- take human life. It's as axiomatic as that. --SLICC Deal for Pentagon Brass * Neurosis, hysteria, stress, nausea, and high blood pressure -- just a few of the health problems linked to noise. --How Noise Pollution Could Send You to the Hospital --------------------------------------------------------- 1b. News: Germany considers taxing atmosphere rent More nations are taxing carbon (see last issue), an indirect tax on atmosphere rent. Within those nations, the advocates are often members of the Green Party. Several Green Parties around the world support taxing the biggest flow of rent -- land rent -- and also promote some sort of "social salary" for the citizenry, an expenditure which needs to be funded by rent if it is to succeed. Already, some advocates of this extra income endorse the use of rents, including Brazilian Senator Eduardo Suplicy. As more of these far-thinking reformers come to power, the chances for public recovery of all rents increase. In Germany, two Green members of the Bundestag -- Bettina Herlitzius and Gerhard Schick -- advance eco-taxes coupled with an eco-bonus. Another Green MP, Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn, advocated just the income supplement. Yet they, and their kind of thinking, often respond to the suggestion of a land tax coupled with a rent dividend. And they are in the place to put such suggestions into law. Anyone out there know German? ==================================================================== 2. Numbers: Inflation, worse than admitted, not fixable by conventional means While the mainstream media reports the home price decline -- Case-Shiller says it was down another 15% -- you need to turn to us to put the stats in the proper perspective of the 18-year land-price cycle. For example, did you catch the following in the Progress Report? * Billionaire publisher and ex-Nixon speechwriter put rising prices and falling dollar into perspective but leave a solution to us. Inflation, worse than admitted, not fixable by conventional means ==================================================================== 3. Good Press: Al Gore for Tax Shift By Alanna Hartzok, earthrts at pa.net This is a fantastic speech by Al Gore, who says "Tax What We Burn Not What We Earn" proposing sharp reduction in payroll tax combined with increase in carbon tax. No, he does not yet grasp importance of surface LVT, but definitely headed in the right direction. Worth the watch here: https://pol.moveon.org/donate/gorechallenge.html To read other encouraging endorsements of the geoist reform -- forego taxes in favor of recovering rents -- please visit the Progress Report daily. You'll see: * The protesters blocking the roads in the pampas, yes, are country folk -- but doing the dirty work for agri-biz. --Agricultural crisis rocks Argentina. This article discusses both land rent and land reform, but alas... ==================================================================== 4. Movement Progress: UN Habitat's GLTN already wanted By Alanna Hartzok, earthrts at pa.net UN Habitat's Global Land Tool Network has a new program, Land Rights and Land Value Capture, thanks to the efforts of many. Even before it is an official GLTN course, our Earth Rights Institute receives several enrollment forms a week from people all over the world who want to take the new online course. The project needs more facilitators for the course, so if you have time, energy, and interest in serving as a course facilitator for individuals or small groups, please let me know. A summary of our work with direct website links to the final drafts of everything will appear in the next GroundSwell. ==================================================================== 5a. Letters: CGO Conference Wrap up and Restart By Sue Walton, sns at swwalton.com, July 21, 2008 CGO execom needs to have its 2008 Overall Conference Evaluation completed and returned by 9/1/08. Evaluations were in the conference packets and were also sent to all those conference participants for whom we had email for. If you need an evaluation, please contact Sue or Scott Walton. Save the Date for August 5-9, 2009, Cleveland, Ohio The Council of Georgist Organizations 29th annual conference which will celebrate the life and accomplishments Mayor Tom Johnson. By Ed Dodson, CGO To everyone who attended and participated in this year's CGO conference and meetings in Kansas City, we thank you and hope you felt the time was well spent. Your conference evaluation forms will help us make next year's conference in Cleveland even better. Tom L. Johnson, Henry George's close collaborator, was Cleveland's greatest mayor. Also, as you have probably read or heard, many Cleveland neighborhoods have been hit very hard by evictions due to foreclosures. A recent segment on the Bill Moyers Journal program showed in graphic detail the extent of destruction. Part of our program will explore the causes of these problems and, of course, feature discussions on what might have been done to prevent the debacle. In response to comments received by attendees who regretted having to choose between concurrent sessions, we hope to plan the sessions so that any sessions that run concurrently can be repeated. Some of you certainly have program ideas to suggest, speakers to recommend, or proposals for your own participation as a presenter. So that we can give full consideration to your ideas, we need to hear from you soon. The CGO conference planning team will be meeting again on August 21st. We would appreciate your input to us by Monday, August 18 for inclusion in our planning discussion. --------------------------------------------------------- 5b. Letters: Haveman and Sexton on Assessment Limits By Wyn Achenbaum Lincoln Institute has published what I think is a rather good analysis of property tax assessment limitations. The press release is at www.prweb.com/releases/property_tax/assessment_limits/prweb1130504 and the study can be purchased in hardcopy for $15 or downloaded as a PDF file for free. It is 44 pages, titled "Property Tax Assessment Limits: Lessons from Thirty Years of Experience" by Mark Haveman and Terri A. Sexton. --------------------------------------------------------- 5c. Letters: Needs info on RSF poverty film By Paul Metz, metz at integer-consult.com, July 20, 2008 Just read the 1st July issue and wonder why not some more info is given on how the film was received in Cannes and reviewed in newspapers, which distributors in which countries bought rights, etc. Where can I and others find that? Also the issue on Jim Hansen's support for tax & dividend I liked very much, it comes close to what I presented four years ago. --------------------------------------------------------- 5d. Letters: Latest Aussie newsletter Karl Fitzgerald, Projects Coordinator of Australia's Georgist outfit, Earthsharing, has sent us this month's newsletter, which looks and reads beautifully. It includes: "The True Cost of Food", "Garnaut responses", and Fred Harrison Radio Interview download. I'm sure he'll send you a copy if you ask him sweetly: news at earthsharing.org.au Karl adds: "Earthsharing Australia is running a Film Competition based on Housing Affordability: www.iwanttolivehere.org.au. $3000 first prize for a 3 minute film based on Georgist principles. Got a handy cam? Can't believe the rate of foreclosures? $5000 homes in Flint, Michigan? Put it on film to deliver genuine reality TV. The latest radio interview on the Renegade Economists with Fred Harrison re 'The Silver Bullet" can be heard - http://www.prosper.org.au/2008/07/21/interview-with-fred-harrison/ Dont forget to subscribe to the podcast. Cheers n keep punching, I liked your RSF special last edition! ==================================================================== 6. From the Editor: Apology; New format Last issue we ran the long letter from RSF's Cliff Cobb and Adele Wick, interspersed with commentary. While I like that format, since it replicates conversation with people taking turns and addressing each point as it comes up, others don't and have every right to their preference. I apologize for offending those who were and promise to never do it again. Also, in our ongoing effort to abbreviate and save readers time while keeping baby sans bathwater, we're trying out not including dates of submissions, since all came in since the last newsletter -- unless the date is of an article published elsewhere. If for any reason you'd like to go back to dates, do let us know. ==================================================================== 7. Likable link: South Africa to challenge tax system By Peter Meakin, mea44kin at iafrica.com, July 4, 2008 "The Creative Solution to Unemployment and Poverty" on our website at www.sacprif.org shows how Georgists can subscribe to become Chartered members of South African Constitutional Property Rights Foundation which, at long last, is about to challenge the validity of the Income Tax and Property Rates Act in South Africa to make way for the HG Single Land Tax. The Chartered Members Roll will be lodged for posterity in the USA Congress Library as well as the British, South African, New Zealand and Australian National libraries. ==================================================================== 8. What You Can Do: Book Drive for Iraq By Christopher Hitchens, via Wyn Achenbaum, via Nick Rosen In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University of Iraq is appealing for people to donate books, especially technical books, social science books, software even. One can send one or two new, current and important books (perhaps they have review copies, extra copies, etc). Visit the university's Web site. http://auis.org/ Get some decent volumes together, pass the word to your friends and co-workers to do the same, and send them off to: Nathan Musselman The American University of Iraq - Sulaimani Building No.7, Street 10 Quarter 410 Ablakh Area Sulaimani, Iraq ==================================================================== 9. At the Margin: Quips and Quotes If uplift is the same as lift up, why are upset and set up opposite in meaning? -- from Crazy English If appropriate and inappropriate remarks and passable and impassable mountain trails are opposites, why are flammable and inflammable materials, heritable and inheritable property, and passive and impassive people the same and valuable objects less treasured than invaluable ones? -- from Crazy English All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them. -- Felix Frankfurter ==================================================================== 10. Publication affairs: Contributing to this issue Along with those acknowledged above with each blurb, Editor: Jeffery J. Smith Assistant Editor: Caspar Davis Archivist: Stewart Goldwater Owner: The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation Founder: Adam Monroe Send your news and other interesting material to the Georgist News at jjs at geonomics.org or gn at progress.org. The deadline for the next issue is August 25. The Georgist News, a project of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, is an email newsletter brought to you free of charge. Its purpose is to keep you updated on the latest news, citations, events, and initiatives of relevance to people who, like Henry George, seek a world free from special privilege and the causes of poverty. Do you know someone who'd enjoy reading the GN? Please forward them an issue and ask them to subscribe, or send us their eddress. As always, it's free. Thanks. The Georgist News is also available on line at http://www.Georgist.com/ ==================================================================
The Georgist News, Volume Eleven, Number Two, August 1, 2008