Alanna Hartzok, M.A.Alanna Hartzok, M.A. is Co-Director of Earth Rights Institute, a civil society organization working for economic justice and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Her 2001 E.F. Schumacher Lecture was published as Democracy, Earth Rights and the Next Economy. That same year she was a candidate for Congress in the Ninth District of Pennsylvania.
In 1993 she initiated tax reform legislation and worked with state Senator Terry Punt and his staff to guide it through Pennsylvania legislative hearings to nearly unanimous passage of Senate Bill 211, signed by Governor Thomas Ridge as Act 108 in November of 1998.
Her published articles on tax reform are used by legislators in the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. Her articles are referenced in the literature of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) in California, a recent issue of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, Dialogues, a publication of the Canada West Foundation, and in several books, including the Worldwatch Institute book by David Roodman, The Natural Wealth of Nations and Creating a Sustainable World, an anthology edited by Trent Schroyher and Tom Golodik. She is one of several people featured in Planet Champions: Adventures in Saving the World - New Paths to Peace, Prosperity & Human Rights, authored by Jack Yost.
Alanna is currently working with a team of colleagues on innovative public finance policy initiatives in Philadelphia and Nigeria. In November, 2004, she was with the team that launched the first ecovillage in Nigeria at the town of Odi in the Niger Delta. Along with Earth Rights Institute Co-Director Anne Goeke, she developed a multi-media intensive seminar entitled Peace, War and Natural Resource Rights.
She is a United Nations ECOSOC NGO Representative for the International Union for Land Value Taxation based in London and as such is working to develop land value taxation policy trainings worldwide. She is also a psycho-spiritual counselor and maintains a small private practice.
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco
Canadian Institute of Psychosynthesis, Montreal
Institute of European Studies, Vienna
M. A., University of West Georgia
B. A., Ohio Wesleyan University
Hartzok has given workshops and lectures on ³earth rights democracy², economic justice, alternatives to neoliberal economics, the land problem, green tax and land value taxation policy at numerous venues, including:
A Focus on Alaska, Norway, and Nigeria
This paper was presented in the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) track of the Eastern Economic Association 30th Annual Conference held February 20 - 22, 2004 in Washington, DC.
Abstract: Citizens of Alaska have been receiving individual dividend checks from an oil rent trust fund since 1982. Norway¹s citizens receive substantial social services and invest oil rents in a permanent fund for the future. Nigeria has yet to establish a similar fund for its oil revenue stream. This paper explores the oil rent institutions of Alaska, Norway and Nigeria with a focus on these questions: Are citizen dividends from oil rent funds currently or potentially a source of substantial basic income? Are oil rent funds the best source for citizen dividends or should CDs be based on other types of resource rents? The paper recommends full use of information and communication technologies for transparency in extractive resource industries, that resource rent from non-renewable resources should be invested in socially and environmentally responsible ways and primarily in the needed transition to renewable energy based economies, and that oil and other non-renewable resource rent funds should transition towards capturing substantial resource rents from surface land site values (ground rent) and other permanent and sustainable sources of rent for possible distribution of citizen dividends.
Twenty-First Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture, Amherst College, October 2001
Summary: Presented to an audience of 600 at Amherst College as an E.F. Schumacher Lecture and now available as a 38-page publication, this gives a dramatic historical perspective of Western land tenure systems, clarifies a deep ethical foundation for land and natural resource ownership, and suggests several practical policy approaches which can secure common heritage resources for the benefit of all. The lecture explores the following topics: Human Rights to the Earth; The Enclosures; Early Christian Teachings; John Locke and the Crack in the Liberty Bell; Thaddeus Stevens and the Civil War; U.S. Imperialism; Earth Rights Policy and New Institutions; Envisioning the Next Economy.
Published in the Spring 2002 issue of Geophilos, a publication of the Land Research Trust. It was also one of the five winning essays of the There Are Alternatives Project of the McKeever Institute of Economic Policy Analysis.
Summary: Wars are often fought over the ownership and control of land and natural resources. Inequitable ownership and wasteful, unsustainable use of the earth's resources are root causes of both the unjust wealth gap between the rich and the poor and the depletion and collapse of our natural resource base. This paper describes the form and function of the Alaska Permanent Fund as a model governmental institution for collection and distribution of natural resource rents, particularly oil, and makes suggestions for improvement of the Fund. It also presents an analysis of fundamental issues regarding natural resource and territorial claims and urges the establishment of a Global Resource Agency to collect and distribute transnational resource revenues.
Presented at the Global Institute for Taxation Conference on Fundamental Tax Reform co-sponsored by Price Waterhouse Coopers and St. John's University, New York, September 30, 1999 and published in Taxation Alternatives for the 21st Century Proceedings of the 1999 Conference. This paper was among those distributed to the US Congress.
Summary: This paper details a number of successful practices and work-in-progress on green tax shift policies which harness incentives for efficient, equitable, and sustainable wealth production and distribution. Research is cited which shows the impressive potential of green tax reform to help solve major social, economic and environmental problems facing our global civilization. Additionally, presented is an integrated local-to-global public finance framework based on green taxation principles and policies.
For complete paper: http://www.earthrights.net/docs/financing.html
For two page summary: http://www.earthrights.net/docs/financing.html
Presented at the Christianity and Human Rights Conference, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama in November 2004. This paper makes a case for a new form of democracy based on human rights to the earth as a birthright, linking this to the Judeo-Christian Jubilee Justice tradition and Old and New Testament teachings. It presents a tax fairness practical policy approach based on the ethical stance of these teachings.
Published in Green Revolution, Vol.56/No. 4, 1999 and also published on the Bulletin Board website of United Nations Center for Human Settlements' Global Campaign for Secure Tenure.
Summary: This essay makes a clear distinction between the benefits derived from secure title to land and the market distortions caused when land is used as a commodity for speculation. It briefly explores historical antecedents to arrangements of land tenure and title, taxation and banking systems. Finally, it articulates the rational for land value taxation policy, as recommended by the UN Center for Human Settlements Habitat II Action Agenda.
Policy Paper Submitted by the International Union for Land Value Taxation to the United Nations Financing for Development Preparatory Process at the NGO Hearings Week, November 2000
Excerpt: Public finance policy can be structured to enhance both private sector economic activity and public sector services. A fundamental reform in tax policy can optimize incentives for a productive market economy while also providing money for education, health care, roads and other infrastructure. Such reform promotes a different kind of market system whereby wealth is fairly distributed and basic needs for all are met.
Published in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, April 1997. Presented at Jerome Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
Summary: Twenty municipalities in Pennsylvania are pioneering an innovative approach to local tax reform that harnesses market incentives for urban renewal. Opting for the so-called 'two-rate' or 'split-rate' property tax, these cities are lowering taxes on buildings, thereby encouraging improvements and renovations, while raising the tax on land values, thus encouraging good site use while discouraging land speculation to maintain land affordability. The resulting infill development as indicated by increased building permits means downtown jobs, efficient use of urban infrastructure, an improved housing stock, and less urban sprawl.
Published in Land Value Taxation: The Equitable and Efficient Source of Public Finance, an anthology edited by Kenneth C. Wenzer, published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., New York, 1999
Summary: Evidence from this research paper suggests that shifting property taxes away from farm buildings and improvements and towards the recapturing of land values back to the community would maintain farm land affordability and significantly enhance incentives for viable sustainable agriculture in Pennsylvania.
First published in 1994 by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation., New York , NY
Excerpt: To have peace on earth, we must work to create the conditions for peace in our own towns and cities. If we would revitalize our urban habitats by improving schools and libraries, creating livelihoods and affordable housing, and maintaining safe and beautiful parks and playgrounds, then we must urge our city council members to collect the ground rent of land to finance public services and greatly reduce or eliminate most other forms of taxation. If the politics of the planet are to be based on fairness rather than on force, then equal rights to earth must become the guiding principle, the sovereign, supreme rule. The fundamental human right which now needs to be affirmed is this: The Earth is the Birthright of All People.
Presented at the Books Not Bombs/Stop Iraq War Forum organized by students at Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania on March 5, 2003.
Excerpt: A new democratic mandate, which we might call earth rights democracy, recognizes that the gifts of nature - the land, oil, minerals, other natural resources and a substantial amount of the monetary value accruing to their use - rightly belong to the people of the world as a whole. The earth is our birthright and our common heritage. What we make from our mental and physical labor can rightfully be held as individual property but the profit of the earth should be shared by all and for all.
For these and other articles go to: www.earthrights.net
Last modified: 18 December 2005
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