Fred, this notice is appended to the bottom of the article at the link: AFP text, photos, graphics and logos shall not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. AFP shall not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions in any AFP content, or for any actions taken in consequence.  | Right. Burn after reading. |
| I think I'll just pluck out my eyes instead. |
| Are we allowed to laugh at them? |
| At my eyes? No. At AFP? Absolutely! |
Hundreds of activists appealed for a global tax on water and the creation of a "world water parliament" to protect its distribution, at the closing of the Alternative World Water Forum on Sunday. The two-day forum's goal is to "promote the creation of a world public service for water" through a series of concrete aqueducts measures, said Bastienne Joerchel of a Swiss charity group. The forum proposed introducing a one-cent tax on water worldwide, which would avoid having to use private funding for the distribution of water.
| Hokay. They have no official standing — they're simply "activists," which is another word for moonbats. Who's going to impose the tax? What's the collection mechanism? What're the penalties for not paying? A worldwide tax implies a world government, which to my knowledge we don't yet have, and if we're lucky we'll never have. On the other hand, a few of them did manage to get their names in the paper, though only in an AFP article, which the rest of the world's forbidden to read under penalty of strongly worded letters and possible nuisance lawsuits... |
| And try to get Jose the poor campesino in some suckhole in South America to pay the tax. Oh right, he wouldn't pay, he'd be exempt, as would the rest of the world except the US ... |
A global water parliament - expected to hold its first meeting in Brussels next year - would establish the rules to assure the equitable distribution of the vital resource.
| Who won the elections for the global water parliament, by the way? |
About 1,200 people from around the globe and 150 non-governmental organisations participated in the forum that opened Friday, including the former Portuguese president Mario Soares, co-chairman of the meeting held ahead of Tuesday's World Water Day. The United Nations will launch on Tuesday its global campaign called "Water for life," which aims to cut by half the number of people worldwide who do not have access to drinking water by 2015.
| That would imply that they're going to do away with all those inconvenient deserts, I'd guess. Or were they going to relocate the Tuaregs and similar folk who prefer dry climates? |
| They're going to tow icebergs into the desert using Greenpeace ships supervised by Euro-born UN diplomats. |
The forum also adopted an action plan for the recognition of water as a human right, its use for the common good, and called for public financing and democratic control of the resource.
| Adopting an action plan implies you've got an executive to execute the plan. Either that, or you had too much wine with lunch... |
| Doesn't their call for 'democratic' control sound a little strange, coming from these people? |
Riccardo Petrella, a professor at Lugano University in Switzerland, called for water to be excluded from the negotiations at the World Trade Organisation on the liberalisation of services, and said the World Bank should stop requiring the privatisation of water as a condition for granting loans.
| We can guess at the political orientation of the participants in the forum. It sounds an awful lot like they're suffering from delusions of adequacy... |
| They'd rather talk about how to deliver water than actually build an aqueduct to deliver water. |
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