Let’s say you’re Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine that helped to spark the worldwide #OccupyWallStreet movement with a single image of a ballerina perched on top of Wall St.’s iconic bull sculpture (because it’s just that easy, Greenpeace). You’ve made an impact and you’re probably feeling pretty Midnight Oil about your art director. Kudos all round. But what now? But advance the narrative, of course, by doubling down with a demand for a tax on global financial transactions and currency trades to “fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world” As if their first crack wasn’t ballsy enough, Adbusters now wants the plot to thicken on October 29th in cities across the world in advance of the G20 in France (read their call to greater action here). Could it work? Well, it’s France, so bad optics of burning cars, communists and a short, well-suited man shrugging apologetically next to a former musician/nudist might not convince Middle America or Stephen Harper of anything save for the solace of their English-speaking Jesus. But you never know. People do all sorts of crazy things after reading magazines. Usually it’s just a haircut, but again, you never know. The Lede blog over at The New York Times considers it:

Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote in The Times’s Economix blog last year that such a tax on financial transactions could lead to less price volatility but would very likely hurt the frequent traders on Wall Street: “It is variously called a ‘transactions tax,’ a ‘financial transactions tax,’ a ‘security transaction excise tax’ or a Tobin tax (after the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, who famously argued for its application to foreign exchange purchases in the late 1970s). By any name, Wall Street hates it, because it would cut into trading profits. But proponents like Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research assert that it would primarily affect short-term ‘noise traders’ and discourage speculation rather than productive investment.” She calculated last year that a sales tax on Wall Street of about 0.5 percent “could raise up to $175 billion in tax revenue a year.” The revenue from a 1 percent tax, extended to markets around the world, would certainly be far higher.

Your move, #OccupyVancouver.

UPDATE: The Province is on to them already, and you really can tell which side they’re on by the picture they’ve chosen of “protestor Daniel Stewart sharing a moment with his pet rat […]” Ugh. Can we not #OccupyTheMedia while we’re at it?