My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.
I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world’s wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.
How else can we interpret the G20’s final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits; public-sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse.
So begins an article by Naomi Klein in the Toronto Globe & mail in the aftermath of G20 summit in June. Very aptly titled :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...
Naomi Klein lives in Toronto and was in the middle of all the action during the G20 summit.Besides her short but pointed piece in G&M, she gave a lengthy interview to Amy Goodman (these 2 were palling around in Toronto with fellow hippies like that tree hugger Vandana Shiva from India). I am going to highlight sections from both.
First of all, she debunks the claim that Canada has never seen violence on the scale seen last week. So why all the police hysteria ? She connects the dots :
http://www.democracynow.org/...
So, what happened on Saturday, when you saw those burning cop cars and windows breaking, was what I can only describe as a cop strike. Essentially, they were just letting it happen. And people were watching this, not understanding why, for hours, the same police car was just allowed to burn. I mean, these guys had just bought themselves a brand new water cannon, and yet they couldn’t seem to find themselves a fire extinguisher.
Now, while that was happening, media outlets were getting press statements. And I’ll just read you one. This is from the Toronto Police Department: "All you have to do is turn on the TV and see what’s happening now. Police cars are getting torched, buildings are being
vandalized, people are getting beat up, and [so] the so-called 'intimidating' police presence is essential to restoring order." In other words, the police were playing public relations, overtly. They were saying, "OK, you’re telling us our price tag was too high. We’re
getting in political trouble for our outrageous demands. So now we’re going to show you this huge threat that we’re up against." And so,we have a police commissioner named Julian Fantino, who’s now started to talk about activists as organized crime. He says it’s not enough to call them thugs, they’re organized criminals. So, what’s dangerous here is that in order to justify their own unjustifiable actions,they need to overinflate a threat.
Yes, welcome to the neoliberal paradise that is the police state, buddies.
Klein then talks about the history of the G20 , more like a people's history or a hidden history than you know , the official version. She refers to an earlier piece published by the Globe & Mail. G20 was conceived by 2 finance ministers in 1999 on the back of a manila envelope : Paul Martin (Canada) and aaahhhh, Larry Summers - that fierce advocate of women, African Americans (paging Cornel West) and
third world countries and the man with the Midas touch who screws up everything he touches . Just before Summers was about to embark on
the grand adventure of massive de-regulation of Wall Street as Clinton's Treasury Secretary.
Here's how the list (of countries to be members of G20) was drawn:
And by Paul Martin’s admission, those countries were not simply the twenty top economies of the world, the biggest GDPs. They were also the countries that were most strategic to the United States. So Larry Summers would make a decision that obviously Iran wouldn’t be in, but Saudi Arabia would be. And so, Saudi Arabia is in. Thailand, it made sense to include Thailand, because it had actually been the Thai economy, which, two years earlier, had set off the Asian economic crisis, but Thailand wasn’t as important to the US strategically as Indonesia, so Indonesia was in and not Thailand. So what you see from this story is that the creation of the G20 was an absolutely top-down decision, two powerful men deciding together to do this, making, you know, an invitation-only list.
And the real motive behind G20 :
And what you really see is that this is an attempt to get around the United Nations, where every country in the world has a vote, and to create this expanded G7 or G8, where they invite some developing countries, but not so many that they can overpower or outvote the
Western—the traditional Western powers. So, as this happened, we have also seen a weakening and an undermining of the United Nations. And I think that that’s the context in which the G20 needs to be understood.
(The article she refers to : http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/...)
yep, G20 was created to be the un-UN , to usurp democracy. you know , the thing that they promised after the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989
(symbolising the end of communism). In reality, as Naomi Klein has mentioned in one of her books, the Berlin wall might have fallen, but new walls, real & virtual are springing up everywhere thanks to the plutocracy/kleptocracy consolidated by neoliberalism : police states, domestic spying, physical walls in US-Mexico border, Gaza blockade, gated communities etc symbolised by the rise of Blackwater etc.
Klein connects the dots where in the neoliberal Utopia live in, the perpetrators stick the victims with the bill, from Toronto to the Gulf . Be it the bankers vs taxpayers, BP vs Gulf communities, developed world vs poor countries reg climate change... Yes, upside down, inside out, perpetrators bailed out, victims pay out. Criminals and their accomplices are to be guarded, protesters are to be imprisoned. Maybe this is the "Democracy" we were promised in the Neoliberal utopia when Communism collapsed. "New Democracy", like the New Democrats and New Labor who are parodies of their old self.
But it is not all hopeless. In her piece, Klein ends with a solution in her G&M piece reg G20:
Since it just tried to stick us with a huge bill for a crisis most of us had no hand in creating, I say we take a cue from Mr. Martin and Mr. Summers. Flip it over, and write on the back of the envelope: Return to sender.
I highly recommend both her G&M piece and interview. There are tons more - like the militarist makeover of Canada (now hearted by Erik Prince, Blackwater) etc etc.
UPDATE : Woohoo !!! First time on the Rec list. Thank you kossacks. No wonder Naomi Klein is awesome :-))))