The biggest eight thieves and warmongers on the planet will meet this month at their annual summit to divide up the world’s wealth.
The G8 is mad e up of the leaders of the eight most powerful countries in the world: the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia.
Last year, mass protests greeted their summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.
This year, it will take place in Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan, to prevent demonstrators disrupting proceedings.
The Japanese state has already clamped down on protests on the island and instead non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are hosting an “alternative NGO summit” miles away. So this year there is no mass action planned to attempt to shut down the summit.
This year the G8 will discuss the economic crisis and how to stabilise their economies. But any agreement will focus on propping up the banks and reducing inflation for the commodities that matter to the capitalists such as oil.
What the G8 won’t do is take action on food inflation, which sparked mass food protests and riots across the world as the prices rose 40 per cent, or on housing where millions of working class families are facing evictions because they were sold “toxic” mortgages. Even action on oil will be to reduce oil prices for multinationals but not for the poor people around the world who need it for lighting and heating. These are examples of how capitalism fails to provide the basic commodities for the mass of people.
The G8 will also be attempting to solve the debt problems of Africa again. For three summits in a row, the G8 has discussed third world debt especially Africa. But the sums handed out in aid are tiny when compared with debt.
For example, Japan is to double its aid to Africa to $1.8 billion by 2012 sounds generous? No, in 2005, which was the year the G8 first made debt an issue at Gleneagles, Africa had debts of US$330 billion and was spending US$15 billion a year in interest payments (source Jubilee Debt Campaign).
These paltry sums won’t rescue Africa from poverty because they continue to be strangled by Western powers and capitalist institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, which advocate policies to keep poor countries in debt and tie them to neo-liberal trade agreements that dump subsidised western goods such as food onto local economies, destroying the jobs of farmers and workers.
At the same time, the G8 nations pour billions of pounds into the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and arm their supporters such as Israel. This year the G8 has said it will “send a strong message toward strengthening the non-proliferation regime” making it clear that Iran’s nuclear capabilities will be pretext for an attack.
The G8 leaders also wage war on their own workers and youth. They have attacked civil liberties, carried out vicious anti-immigrant and anti-youth campaigns, cut wages and welfare. All these issues of poverty, war, racism and freedom are linked and continue because of the G8’s economic system: capitalism.
While we can’t demonstrate on a Japanese island, the struggle against war, poverty and erosion of civil liberties is already being taken onto the streets all round the world. That is why the G8 are afraid of the masses mobilising at their summits as the uprisings have already begun.