This week we have started an action to denounce on an international scale the irresponsibility, culpability and punishability of the main actors of global finance and the highest political leaders (heads of state and government) of the 20 ‘richest’ states in the world. The two groups will receive a specific public letter by e-mail. Over the course of a month, we will send copies of the letters to hundreds, thousands of people, associations, and movements asking them to send copies of the letters directly to the 35 recipients.
As for the 15 financial actors, we have identified the presidents of the two private companies that manage respectively the Chicago Stock Exchange (which introduced in 2020 water transactions in the derivatives stock market, reducing water to a financial asset) and the New York Stock Exchange (which decided in 2021 to entrust 30% of the natural world to the management of a new category of private companies listed on the stock exchange, the Natural Assets Corporations, thus reducing any natural element to a financial asset); the presidents of the three largest and most powerful private investment funds in the world (BlackRock, Vanguard et State Street, together they manage more than 22 trillion, more than the wealth produced in 2021 by the United States and almost ten times that of Italy) and, finally, the presidents of the ten largest banks in the world: 4 Chinese, 2 US , 2 French, 1 British and 1 Japanese!
As for the twenty heads of state and government, we have limited the list to the top twenty countries in the world in 2021 ranking according to GDP. The list includes all the most economically powerful countries in the world. It opens with the United States and China and closes with Turkey and Switzerland. ,
What do we write to these powerful people? That it is the right and duty of all the inhabitants of the Earth to denounce as unacceptable that they, the rulers t- those who distinctly in their countries and together internationally have the power to decide on the state and future of humanity and the world – continue to wage war in Ukraine and twenty other places on Earth and threaten to unleash nuclear war, keeping 3.6 billion people without health coverage and 4.4 billion without any social protection. We tell them that they are behaving like criminals (and not just crazy, like madmen) by persisting in the ongoing destruction of the planet’s life (ecocide) for decades, while being aware of it. Let us tell them that the climate disaster, the destruction of biodiversity, forests and soils, the contamination and drying up of rivers and lakes, the pollution of oceans and air, the impoverishment of billions of people, the intolerable social inequalities, are the product of their deliberate choices and not of nature or misfortune.
They could have avoided them but they did not want to. They are sowing destruction and death and talk of adaptation, of resilience. They scoff at words like ‘transition’ (an insolent term in the face of the drama of the situation). They cuddle themselves in continuous world summits from which spring whirlwinds of useless declarations1 of which they take pleasure in changing a few adjectives and/or moving a few commas from the dozens of previous similar declarations.
Our denunciation aims first of all to tell the dominant that they are directly responsible and personally guilty, and that it is not true that we must all individually and collectively change our actions and behavior to save the life of the planet and build social justice from below. It is too easy for them to argue such a thesis. It is up to them, instead, to stop being the lords and masters of the world, to dominate and impose their predatory choices and the defence of their own interests of power, domination and enrichment. Hence the title of the denunciation ‘Because of you… the unacceptable’. Secondly, it aims to share the fundamental principle of every democracy and justice system that considers that it belongs to citizens to rise up against the power that reigns, that discriminates, excludes, destroys common goods essential to life, does not respect universal rights, kills. As is manifestly the case with the current system.
We propose to the inhabitants of the Earth to ‘stand up’, to fight to liberate humanity and life on Earth
a) from the domination of global finance, which hoards every good, especially knowledge and technology (see patents on living beings and artificial intelligence). Life is not the price imposed by speculation,
b) from the subjugation of public political powers to the individual corporate interests of private industrial, commercial, technocratic and financial subjects and groups.
The aim is to regenerate the dimension, the sphere of the ‘public’, the ‘we’, and to (re)invent the political and planetary politics of life for peace, justice, freedom and common security. The dominant think they can buy everything with money and dominate everything with weapons. They are wrong. It is their basic fault.
Agora of the Inhabitants of the Earth:
Alain Adriaens (B), Pina Ancona (I), Marcos P. Arruda (BR), Alassane Ba (F, Senegal), Guido Barbera (I), Cristina Bertelli (F), Marcelo Barros (BR), Joao Caraça (PT), Luca Cecchi (I), Martine Chatelain (CND-Québec), Francesco Comina (I), Carmelo Corso (I), Roberto D’Ambrogio (I), Alain Dangoisse (B), Fabrice Delvaux (B), Anibal Faccendini (Arg), Maíra Fernandes De Melo (BR), (Armando De Negri (BR), Adriana Fernandez (CL), Alfio Foti (I), Pierre Galand (B), Lilia Ghanem (Lebanon),Yovan Gilles (F), Laury Gingreau (F), Mélissa Gingreau (F), Fatoumata Ki Zerbo (Burkina Faso), Pierre Jasmin (CND-Québec), Luis Infanti de la Mora (CL), Kim Le Quang (B), Paola Libanti (I), Michele Loporcaro (I), Vladimir Mitev (BG), Loretta Moramarco (I), Christine Pagnoulle (B), Marinella Nasoni (I), Maria Palatine (D, B), Nicola Perrone (I), Riccardo Petrella (I, B), Luc Pilmeyer (B), Pietro Pizzuti (I, B), Jean-Yves Proulx (CND-Québec), Domenico Rizzuti (I), Roberto Savio (I), Catherine Schlitz (B), Cristiana Spinedi (CH), Bernard Tirtiaux (B), Helene Tremblay (CND-Québec), Philippe Véniel (F), Emanuele Villa (I), Karine Watelet (B) Jean-Pierre Wauquier (F)
Despite their name in French , the enclosed documents are in English
