Ethical Capitalism Network

www.ethicalcapitalism.net

My name is Steve Wallis. The Ethical Capitalism Network is a non-party political organisation, but obviously some people in the network will be members of various political parties in order to try to encourage them to adopt more ethical policies, leading to ethical societies across the world (and hopefully an entirely ethical world eventually).

I live in Britain, and perhaps an ethical society will first be created here, but it could quickly spread to many other countries around the world. Hopefully ethical capitalism will be capable of solving many if not all of the world’s most serious problems, including poverty, unemployment, famines and environmental destruction. The struggle for ethical capitalism could lead to some sort of socialist world, or an ethical world with some capitalist and some socialist countries, and I personally am a socialist, but the Network is open to those of other political persuasions.

The proposals I am currently putting forward for the Network are as follows:

• A fair electoral system that avoids the need for tactical voting. The fairest electoral system I know of is proportional representation by single transferable vote. There need to be a reasonably large number of candidates elected per constituency/ward to avoid favouring mainstream parties (which at present tend to be dominated by supporters of big business, who would strongly oppose ethical methods).
• The closure of all tax havens around the world.
• The ending of all tax loopholes as soon as possible after they are discovered.
• The seizure of assets of all companies and individuals that try to avoid paying their fair share of tax by still using any remaining tax havens or relocating elsewhere in the world - including money in bank accounts, shares on stock markets, call centres, factories, oil rigs, stock and equipment.
• Ethical practices in farming, such as banning battery chickens and eggs (including importing them from foreign countries).
• Ethical attitudes towards the environment, concentrating on renewable sources of energy including tidal power (which would not cause blots on the landscape like wind turbines or be subject to weather fluctuations).
• The closure of, and ending moves to create more, nuclear power stations (which could kill far man more people than Chernobyl either due to human error or terrorist attacks due to their much greater proximity to cities in countries like the UK).
• Complete nuclear disarmament (since use of such weapons would massacre many innocent civilians fighting back against vicious regimes who could be attacked using such weapons).
• Truly ethical foreign policies, such as banning arms sales to dictatorships (Labour claimed to be adopting an ethical foreign policy but allowed British Aerospace to continue selling jets to the Indonesian regime which used them against the people of East Timor who were fighting for independence).
• Defence of civil liberties, including opposition to ID cards (which would be linked to a central database containing a lot of information about us all and could be used against activists trying to achieve an ethical society), the "stop and question" proposal (that would allow the police to ask people their name and where they are going, with the threat of a £5,000 fine and a criminal record), the Big Brother road pricing proposal (which would transmit data about where every car is to satellites) and extension of the time that prisoners could be held without trial.
• Opposing the continued occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is proving counterproductive, in both encouraging terrorism and preventing democracy in those countries (truly democratic elections cannot be held while a country is being occupied, as illustrated by the elections in Iraq, in which some candidates' names were not shown on ballot papers so people did not know who they were really voting for, and which were used to further the divide-and-rule strategy of US and British imperialism).

These are merely my proposals to get the Network started. I have set up the Ethical Capitalism Discussion Forum (that can be accessed by email or the web, and has an archive on the web that can be searched) so that positions of the Network can be discussed, as well as strategies for achieving an ethical capitalist world, through gradual reforms to capitalism or through some sort of revolution.

Click here to go to the home page of the Ethical Capitalism Discussion Forum