The G8 and G20 summits are now over, most of the leaders and their delegations have left Toronto, and sections of the security fence will start to be disassembled today.
But many are still unjustly being detained and need to be released, and the city has yet to shed the police-state feeling that has smothered it these past few days.
These summits just never added up to make much sense at all:
* they were to promote austerity, but cost more than $1.24 billion to stage
* the major development contribution from Canada was $1.1 billion for maternal health, less than the price tag for the summits
* the G8 pledged $5 billion for maternal health, welll short of the $30 billion the United Nations says is necessary to stop preventable deaths,
* this pledge may not mean that much, given the G8 has failed to make good on more than $20 billion of past pledges, and
* the G20 was at times talked about as the more democratic version of the G8, but is still 172 countries short of the United Nations, now often referred to as the G192.
The Council of Canadians was able to make numerous credible interventions against the agenda and the very existence of these summits:
* our 'scrap the summits' and ‘these meetings should be moved to the UN' message appeared in many commentaries, editorials, speeches and common discourse
* we quickly challenged the infringement on civil liberties by the Toronto police and their purchase of LRADs by handing out free ear-plugs
* we repeatedly highlighted in the media the folly of $2 million spent on the construction of a fake lake for the G20 summit
* we were a large part of the Peoples Summit, with Maude Barlow opening the forum and numerous staff offering workshops on key issues to many people
* we were in numerous newspapers and television news reports when we took to canoes to take our 'scrap the summits' message to the Deerhurst Resort near Huntsville
* we challenged the law brought in for the summit that anyone has to produce identification and state their purpose for being within 5 metres of the security fence, by measuring 5 metres out from the fence and marking the line with yellow tape for the media
* we sold out Massey Hall and had an incredible line-up of powerful speakers (the real world leaders) address the 2,700 people in attendance as well as many others who watched the forum by web-cast in communities across Canada and at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, and
* we joined with 25,000 others for a peaceful march through the city on Saturday afternoon.
That said, many negative things have come out of the summits:
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* as noted above, many women and children will continue to die preventable deaths because the leaders of the most-developed countries only promised a fraction of what was needed
* the G20 countries pledged to cut their deficits in half by 2013, which can only mean structural readjustment for millions of people, more fire-sale sell-offs of public services, and more cutbacks to critical social programs and social supports
* the G20 summit communique noted that climate change would remain ‘top of mind', an astonishing head in the sand position, and
* the G20 recommitted itself to the World Trade Organization's Doha Round (though admittedly few believe that will go anywhere now).
Much is being made now about the smashing of windows and the burning of police cars after the rally and march concluded on Saturday afternoon. While we can't condone this, and those who do these things can expect to be arrested, we see this as a product of rage, a rage that comes with marginalization, exclusion, and a toxic economy that so casually discards people. The lesson must surely be that billions can be spent on policing and security, but without justice there never will truly be peace.
We are very concerned that more than 900 people have been arrested. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has said that many peaceful protestors were caught up in the sweeping arrests and police raids. Many also experienced the provocation of the police in the days leading up to the summit -- the suspicious look, the searching of bags, the unnecessary and intimidating questioning. We join with Amnesty International in calling for an inquiry into the appropriateness of police actions both prior to and during the summits.
We should take some solace in our courage and commitment, the fact that we did what we could do to challenge the monstrosity of the G8/G20 summits, and that in many ways we won public opinion. And we will need to do what we always have done: assess, regroup, speak out for civil liberties and the necessity of dissent, and continue our struggle for democratic global decision-making, for trade, water and climate justice.
Thanks for reminding us of all the good things that were accomplished by the protests and other counter-G20 activities.
It gets really tiresome hearing the moaning about how "the message was lost" because of the high-profile acts of vandalism. In point of fact a lot of people's minds were opened up to the reality of not only the G20, but also the Canadian and Ontario governments and their police forces, thanks to the work done by the Council of Canadians, the labour movement, and other social movements. The corporate media were never going to help get our message out, vandalism or no vandalism.
If the G20 were held here again next year, the protests would be even bigger than they were this time.
The business media worked feverishly to spin the threadbare results of the G20 meeting (held on the heels of the G8 Summit in Huntsville, Ontario), into a tapestry of triumph, an ode to worldly consensus and to Canadian hospitality. But plainly, it's a hard sell -- especially in light of the city core lock-down, and the acts of petty vandalism that police permitted (or planned) to occur, before resorting to the use of tear gas, pepper spray, beatings and mass arrests. Many peaceful protesters, working journalists, downtown shoppers and curious on-lookers were snared by the cop tactics. And so, illusions in bourgeois democracy and in 'officers of the peace' fell like a multitude of bowling pins.
Meanwhile, inside the media bubble of the world capitalist summit, there was minimal agreement on detail. This betrayed the actual farce of the high level gathering, which could have been conducted on Skype for free -- minus the mini-police state imposed on Torontonians.
To the extent that the G20 leaders agreed to do anything, the measures they endorsed could hasten a global depression, and quicken the descent into environmental disaster.
The rich countries' bosses promised to cut their budgetary deficits in half by 2013, and to cap their cumulative debt as a proportion of GDP by 2016. If attempted, without taxing big corporations and the super-rich, such actions would choke off jobs, services and investment in production, plunging economies into crisis, and billions into misery.
But Japan is exempt. Italy is not expected to meet the deadline. While Britain and Germany have announced Draconian cuts, Harper is not saying, and Obama is walking a tightrope. Revealing the blatancy of their class bias, the G8 and G20 rejected a tax on financial institutions (proposed by the more desperate French, Germans and British), and they put off until the next G20 summit in Seoul, South Korea any discussion of bank regulatory reforms.
Concerning climate change, the summiteers agreed to contemplate cuts to the subsidies paid carbon-emitting oil and gas industries. Of course such contemplations are subordinate to "country-specific strategies". Canada's federal government, for instance, is increasing its overall subsidies to the Alberta tar sands. Even the language on climate change from this summit is weaker than that agreed at the previous G20 gab-fest.
What about the G8? "The gap between the G8's compassionate rhetoric and its readiness to help was especially striking" said the June 27 Toronto Star lead editorial. While hundreds of thousands of women, and nearly 9 million children die needlessly every year, the $50 billion in aid promised at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 "fell a breathtaking $20 billion short". "This is a shabby performance for a rich club that generates close to $40 trillion in wealth", stated the Star. Canada's largest circulation daily failed to mention the source of this enormous wealth -- the stolen natural resources and exploited labour of workers globally, especially in the Third World.
The G8 leaders went out of their way to caution the United Nations against hoping for much more from them, notwithstanding the 'Millennium Development Goals' which aim to reduce world poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. And really, isn't that the whole point of the G8 and the G20? There the richest elites do not run the risk of getting outvoted by the 172 other countries represented at the U.N. -- which can be mildly embarrassing, even if U.N. votes change few economic facts on the ground.
On 'security' issues, the G8 endorsed a five-year exit plan from Afghanistan (which can always be extended). They denounced Iran and North Korea (without any commitment to eradicate the largest stock piles of nuclear weapons, which happen to be held by the USA, Russia and Europe). And they called for an 'easing' of Israel's blockade of Gaza, rather than demanding an end to the siege, let alone the dismantling of the Israeli apartheid wall, or recognition of the right of return for all Palestinian refugees.
None of the 'decisions' of the G8 and G20 were actually made at the summits, which serve a rubber-stamp and photo-op function for pre-negotiated policies, steeped in diplomatic vacuity. Thus, working people, the poor and all oppressed sections of society had good reason to protest long before the summits. After all, we live daily under disaster capitalism.
We've read all the corporate newspaper reports and watched all the corporate TV coverage. So how about a look at what the left-wing media are saying?
Here's an excerpt from the coverage at the World Socialist Web Site:
Every head of state present, most of them despised by their own citizens, knows that the measures to be taken against the living standards of hundreds of millions of people worldwide will provoke anger and opposition, as the Greek events have demonstrated. The austerity policies cannot be implemented peacefully and democratically. They must ultimately be imposed by force.
The transformation of downtown Toronto into an armed camp, for the purpose of protecting the cabal of bourgeois politicians, joined by the managing director and chairman of the International Monetary Fund and the president of the World Bank, is expressive of the real state of social relations on a global scale. Ranged on one side-the bankers, the corporate elite and their political flunkeys; on the other-broad layers of the population, as yet politically unclarified but determined to fight for decent conditions for themselves and their families.
The ruling elite has the advantage at this point of a higher degree of consciousness about its crisis and the steps it needs to take. The right-wing minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper in Canada, along with the Ontario provincial Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty and the local Toronto authorities, took pains to organize a major confrontation with protesters, which they hoped they could use to their political advantage.
The holding of the event in the middle of Toronto was itself something of a provocation. The city has been a center of anti-globalization sentiment and a mass showing of opposition could be counted on.