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Off The Fence: G20 can only fix global economy using democracy
Susan Thompson
for Smoky River Express
We’re in the midst of the worst economic crisis since WWII.
The economy may or may not be starting to recover. Canada as a whole is supposed to be showing signs the recession is over. Here in Alberta, where revenues are hog-tied to natural gas prices it may take longer. Premier Stelmach has already warned not to expect a full recovery for up to three years.
Part of what makes this recession so bad is that the economic crisis spread outward from the financial centres of the world through trade. Free trade and harmonization of national economies, long trumpeted as the only keys to prosperity, also mean that when one big economy crashes, it takes others with it.
A global crisis needs, of course, a global solution. That solution is in the hands of a small number of nations charged with directing the global economy through their membership in the G8, recently expanded to become the G20.
While G20 decisions may seem far above the average person, happening as they do out there at the official international level, they actually do determine whether you can get a job, refinance your mortgage, get a loan if you’re a small business, and ultimately, feed your family.
“The G20 process has proven critical to our collective response to the global recession,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the recent G20 in Pittsburgh. “Canada has been a strong participant at these summits because our country brings a strong economic record to the table.”
Harper has also announced Canada will host the G20 and the G8 summits next year in Muskoka, Ontario.
Canada is fortunate enough, it’s true, to be a member of what is actually a very small and exclusive club of nations. The G20’s members have no problem reminding us they represent 85 per cent of world production, 80 per cent of world trade, and two thirds of world population. What that really means is 19 countries control 80 per cent of the world’s resources. Some 173 countries of the world, who between them still represent a third of the world’s population of six billion people, are being left out. They’re not “at the table.” Shouldn’t they be?
And who is really sitting at that table already? It’s certainly not the citizens of the world. The G20 is hardly democratic. The group has no headquarters, no employees, and no statute. The G20 is not part of or set up to act as any kind of democratic global government. It could be; it could be built to function like an economic security council, working through the United Nations, which would mean its seats would be filled through an electoral process, it would have a statute, its proceedings would be transparent, and it could be held accountable to regular citizens.
Right now, the only way for regular citizens to have any say in G20 decisions is to protest. And as soon as you try to speak out as a protestor, officials brand you as a criminal and a terrorist. Protestors face not only difficulty in getting permits to exercise their democratic rights to free speech and assembly, but at the actual protests they face barricaded streets, dogs, armoured vehicles, snipers, Secret Services, gunboats, Air Force jets, and thousands of police officers decked out in intimidating riot gear.
If you don’t believe me, just read reports of the security at the most recent G20 meetings in Pittsburgh. My own husband was once charged with welding the manholes in downtown Calgary shut for a G8 summit there, presumably to keep the undesirable rabble from travelling through the sewers.
While we may be told such heavy security is there to guard against terrorist attacks, it is more often than not turned against protestors, even peaceful ones, leading to arrests and jail time for some, and making too many others the victims of police brutality.
The funny thing is, it is the protestors who have been warning for years that international economics need more intervention by governments, and more regulation, to protect regular people from economic crisis.
Anti-summit or people’s summits, NGO’s, independent observers, and hundreds of thousands of citizens have warned of the dangers of harmonization and “free” trade all along.
They’ve warned again and again that a global economic system can’t be built on the idea of exponential, infinite growth when we live on a planet with finite - and in many cases non-renewable - resources.
So far, their suggestions and criticisms have had to be written on protest signs held by people who are not even allowed to get within sight of G20 summit windows, let alone G20 members.
As a result, until recently G8 and G20 members simply ignored the protestors and their concerns, instead repeating their fervent belief in the holy trinity of free market ideology - liberalization, privatization, and deregulation.
Now that we’ve ended up in a global financial crisis, they’ve suddenly changed their tune. Recession has forced the G20 to finally acknowledge markets are fallible, and that more intervention by governments is needed. Suddenly, they’re talking about stimulus and regulation, calling for reforms to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and insisting on increased development aid to help poor countries.
Of course, had they considered these ideas seriously in the first place, the current financial crisis might never had happened.
They might still be playing lip service to these ideas even now. G20 commitments aren’t binding. World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, on the other hand, are binding and enforceable by sanctions. If G20 members adopt the Doha round WTO expansion, as they pledged to do by 2010, they’ll be forced to keep deregulating since a huge part of that is agreement involves deregulating finance.
The G20 needs to actually change the free market ideology they’re working from rather than reinforcing the financial institutions built to put it into practice, such as the WTO and IMF.
In other words, the “solutions” the G20 offers need to be different than the original “solutions” that got us into this mess. Free trade, open markets, and sanctions against domestic governments trying to exercise their own national sovereignty (ie, “protectionism”) can hardly save us when they got us here in the first place.
The G20 won’t make those changes until the group starts listening, really listening, to the good ideas coming from regular people who aren’t even at the table yet.
Ultimately, the only way to get out of this global economic crisis and protect ourselves from getting back into another one in the future is to ensure democratic governance of the economy.
We need a genuine G6billion summit, one that allows us all to democratically determine our economic future. The only way we’ll get it is to keep asking for it, keep demanding it, and keep speaking out even as they send riot police to stop us.
We have all the more reason to speak out now, after all, which people still unemployed, businesses still failing, and poverty still claiming our family and friends.
It’s bad enough to go through a global recession once. But if we don’t speak out now, we may never recover, or worse, history may be doomed to repeat itself.
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