Dankdude
Well-Known Member
Recent interventions by central banks to flush liquidity into panic-stricken financial markets have demonstrated again the wistful make-believe of the corporate "free market" fairy tale. It has no happy ending. Free markets exist no more than fairies do. On the other hand, big bad transnational wolves and carnivorous fee-fi-fo-fum financial giants abound and rig markets to catch as many victims as they can.
Industries like financial services, pharmaceuticals, agri-business, oil and petrochemicals, mining, armaments production, media and communications are dominated by a handful of companies. Nothing is free about a market dominated by the few dozen corporations that together control such vast areas of the global economy. Likewise, the grotesque equation "free markets = democracy" touted so glibly by corporate-owned media and corporate-owned politicians amounts to a terminal corruption of language.
An underlying connection exists between the fraudulent verbal currency used by corporate media to misrepresent the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere and worth-less-and-less monetary currency in the form of dollars and diverse credit derivatives paper blown around global financial markets by speculators. International markets have taken up the London Stock Exchange motto "My word is my bond" and turned it into "My word is my bond so long as some market-rigging bankers' cartel will somehow bail me out."
It was Czar Alexander and Talleyrand who with much satisfaction agreed they could change the meaning of words from one 19th Century G-8 meeting to the next. In those days, they called it the Congress System. Then, European despots ran the system to enrich themselves and their loyal elites, to sacrifice masses of their people to savage industrialization and to effect their colonialist genocides around the globe. In North America, their US and Canadian understudies learned the lessons well. Now similar kinds of elites sacrifice their peoples to corporate globalization and work their neo-colonial barbarism using double duplicity to get what they want.
Politically, they have exploited their peoples' fear of terrorism. Offering security, they have removed fundamental liberties and executed foreign policies violating the UN Charter and humanitarian and human rights law in a way bound to provoke terrorist retaliation. Economically, they have offered prosperity by deliberately fomenting an extended, unsustainable credit boom. Now they try to cover up the bust while still pursuing unsustainable policies that promote inequality at home and abroad. It is impossible to overstate the greed and cynicism of the global elites.
G-8 - an anti-democratic global mob
The G-8 latter-day Congress System is for all practical purposes a squalid cartel. These powerful countries use the G-8 process to work out how best to share quotas of power and to manage their respective spheres of influence. As an institution the G-8 process effectively sidelines the UN. The UN Security Council serves mainly to offer spurious legitimacy to decisions taken elsewhere by the G-8.
The G-8 gatherings began in 1975 at the instigation of French President Giscard D'Estaing. In those days the members were six, the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Canada joined the informal group in 1976. Russia began participating in 1997. The European Community, as it then was, began attending in 1977. Now the European Union, it is represented at G-8 meetings by the President of the European Commission and the President of the the European Council.
So this modern Congress System is in fact an imperialist Thing with far more tentacles than might appear from the economical-with-the-truth G-8 moniker. Although the summits happen once a year they are the annual culmination of constant coordination on many policy areas by government functionaries. Quarterly meetings by a group known as the Sherpas, aides of government leaders, prepare for the summits on the basis of information from other groups, like finance ministers and the other ministries of which most governments are composed, Foreign Ministries, Interior and Justice Ministries, Health Ministries, Environment Ministries and so on.
Terror - factitious bait
Working groups of various kinds also contribute to the preparations for each summit. Currently organized are the High Level Group on Non-Proliferation, the Rome/Lyons Group on terrorism and organized crime, the Counter-Terrorism Expert Group among various others. An extraordinary amount of work and organization - as many as 80 meetings a year - by many bright, talented people goes into dressing up the avowed aims of the summit declarations. They make a fine public relations mulch for corporate media to cover up the genocidal colonialist roots of the bloody fi-fi-fo-fum G-8 imperialist beanstalk.
In matters of trade and finance, governments and central banks coordinate policy in partnership with the world's major financial houses and monopolistic transnationals. International relations reflect their fundamental gangsterism - "do what we want, or else" - rendering irrelevant established international humanitarian and human rights law because those basic norms impede the imperialist globalizing project. Even by the standards of consummate humbugs like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the hypocrisy of G-8 summit declaration-speak is extravagant.
The declaration on terrorism from this year's summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, is a fine example of G-8 cant from countries who collude in violations of human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti and elsewhere. The G-8 countries support vicious repressive regimes around the world., from Mexico to Morocco, from Uzbekistan to Colombia, from Egypt to Equatorial Guinea. European Union governments have collaborated in gross violations of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by facilitating transfer of prisoners for torture either to third countries or to US clandestine prisons as well as to Guantanamo. Still:
"We reaffirm that the promotion and protection of human rights for all and the rule of law is essential to all counter terrorism efforts, and we recognize that effective counter-terrorism measures and the protection of human rights are not conflicting goals, but complementary and mutually reinforcing. We call on all States to ensure that any measures taken to combat terrorism comply with their obligations under international law, in particular human rights law, refugee law and international humanitarian law." (1)
Consider the unimaginable horror and suffering undergone by millions of Iraqis, brought about by these powerful leaders. Apart from the dead and wounded civilians - well over a million by now - several millions of refugees have fled the chaos provoked by the Bush regime and its allies. In Palestine, over a million people in Gaza are subjected to a medieval-style blockade by Israel supported by the European Union and the United States.
Israel holds around ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners and uses torture as a matter of routine. In Haiti, where thousands of civilians were murdered during the coup backed by the US and its European allies, hundreds of political prisoners remain unjustly imprisoned. Consider the hypocrisy of US allies' responses to the liberation of mass-murdering CIA man Luis Posada Carriles - a microcosm of their grotesque double standards.
And yet earlier in that same declaration these people stated, "We, the leaders of the G8, are united in condemning in the strongest terms all acts of terrorism and reaffirm that there can be no justification for such acts which constitute one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and to life and the enjoyment of human rights. We remain resolute in our shared commitment to counter terrorism while promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, and economic growth and opportunity. Our sympathies belong to all victims of terrorist acts, wherever they occur and by whomever they are committed."
The horrific results of G-8 leaders' foreign policies have provoked terrorist retaliation against their peoples. The obvious best protection against terrorism is a genuine commitment to uphold existing, painstakingly established international law, not the ad hoc improvised G-8 counter-terrorism charade. G-8 leaders' insincerity is self-evident from the way their governments use anti-terror legislation to suppress legitimate dissent on contentious policy issues that have nothing to do with terrorism. Bait and switch.
Industries like financial services, pharmaceuticals, agri-business, oil and petrochemicals, mining, armaments production, media and communications are dominated by a handful of companies. Nothing is free about a market dominated by the few dozen corporations that together control such vast areas of the global economy. Likewise, the grotesque equation "free markets = democracy" touted so glibly by corporate-owned media and corporate-owned politicians amounts to a terminal corruption of language.
An underlying connection exists between the fraudulent verbal currency used by corporate media to misrepresent the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere and worth-less-and-less monetary currency in the form of dollars and diverse credit derivatives paper blown around global financial markets by speculators. International markets have taken up the London Stock Exchange motto "My word is my bond" and turned it into "My word is my bond so long as some market-rigging bankers' cartel will somehow bail me out."
It was Czar Alexander and Talleyrand who with much satisfaction agreed they could change the meaning of words from one 19th Century G-8 meeting to the next. In those days, they called it the Congress System. Then, European despots ran the system to enrich themselves and their loyal elites, to sacrifice masses of their people to savage industrialization and to effect their colonialist genocides around the globe. In North America, their US and Canadian understudies learned the lessons well. Now similar kinds of elites sacrifice their peoples to corporate globalization and work their neo-colonial barbarism using double duplicity to get what they want.
Politically, they have exploited their peoples' fear of terrorism. Offering security, they have removed fundamental liberties and executed foreign policies violating the UN Charter and humanitarian and human rights law in a way bound to provoke terrorist retaliation. Economically, they have offered prosperity by deliberately fomenting an extended, unsustainable credit boom. Now they try to cover up the bust while still pursuing unsustainable policies that promote inequality at home and abroad. It is impossible to overstate the greed and cynicism of the global elites.
G-8 - an anti-democratic global mob
The G-8 latter-day Congress System is for all practical purposes a squalid cartel. These powerful countries use the G-8 process to work out how best to share quotas of power and to manage their respective spheres of influence. As an institution the G-8 process effectively sidelines the UN. The UN Security Council serves mainly to offer spurious legitimacy to decisions taken elsewhere by the G-8.
The G-8 gatherings began in 1975 at the instigation of French President Giscard D'Estaing. In those days the members were six, the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Canada joined the informal group in 1976. Russia began participating in 1997. The European Community, as it then was, began attending in 1977. Now the European Union, it is represented at G-8 meetings by the President of the European Commission and the President of the the European Council.
So this modern Congress System is in fact an imperialist Thing with far more tentacles than might appear from the economical-with-the-truth G-8 moniker. Although the summits happen once a year they are the annual culmination of constant coordination on many policy areas by government functionaries. Quarterly meetings by a group known as the Sherpas, aides of government leaders, prepare for the summits on the basis of information from other groups, like finance ministers and the other ministries of which most governments are composed, Foreign Ministries, Interior and Justice Ministries, Health Ministries, Environment Ministries and so on.
Terror - factitious bait
Working groups of various kinds also contribute to the preparations for each summit. Currently organized are the High Level Group on Non-Proliferation, the Rome/Lyons Group on terrorism and organized crime, the Counter-Terrorism Expert Group among various others. An extraordinary amount of work and organization - as many as 80 meetings a year - by many bright, talented people goes into dressing up the avowed aims of the summit declarations. They make a fine public relations mulch for corporate media to cover up the genocidal colonialist roots of the bloody fi-fi-fo-fum G-8 imperialist beanstalk.
In matters of trade and finance, governments and central banks coordinate policy in partnership with the world's major financial houses and monopolistic transnationals. International relations reflect their fundamental gangsterism - "do what we want, or else" - rendering irrelevant established international humanitarian and human rights law because those basic norms impede the imperialist globalizing project. Even by the standards of consummate humbugs like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the hypocrisy of G-8 summit declaration-speak is extravagant.
The declaration on terrorism from this year's summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, is a fine example of G-8 cant from countries who collude in violations of human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti and elsewhere. The G-8 countries support vicious repressive regimes around the world., from Mexico to Morocco, from Uzbekistan to Colombia, from Egypt to Equatorial Guinea. European Union governments have collaborated in gross violations of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by facilitating transfer of prisoners for torture either to third countries or to US clandestine prisons as well as to Guantanamo. Still:
"We reaffirm that the promotion and protection of human rights for all and the rule of law is essential to all counter terrorism efforts, and we recognize that effective counter-terrorism measures and the protection of human rights are not conflicting goals, but complementary and mutually reinforcing. We call on all States to ensure that any measures taken to combat terrorism comply with their obligations under international law, in particular human rights law, refugee law and international humanitarian law." (1)
Consider the unimaginable horror and suffering undergone by millions of Iraqis, brought about by these powerful leaders. Apart from the dead and wounded civilians - well over a million by now - several millions of refugees have fled the chaos provoked by the Bush regime and its allies. In Palestine, over a million people in Gaza are subjected to a medieval-style blockade by Israel supported by the European Union and the United States.
Israel holds around ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners and uses torture as a matter of routine. In Haiti, where thousands of civilians were murdered during the coup backed by the US and its European allies, hundreds of political prisoners remain unjustly imprisoned. Consider the hypocrisy of US allies' responses to the liberation of mass-murdering CIA man Luis Posada Carriles - a microcosm of their grotesque double standards.
And yet earlier in that same declaration these people stated, "We, the leaders of the G8, are united in condemning in the strongest terms all acts of terrorism and reaffirm that there can be no justification for such acts which constitute one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and to life and the enjoyment of human rights. We remain resolute in our shared commitment to counter terrorism while promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, and economic growth and opportunity. Our sympathies belong to all victims of terrorist acts, wherever they occur and by whomever they are committed."
The horrific results of G-8 leaders' foreign policies have provoked terrorist retaliation against their peoples. The obvious best protection against terrorism is a genuine commitment to uphold existing, painstakingly established international law, not the ad hoc improvised G-8 counter-terrorism charade. G-8 leaders' insincerity is self-evident from the way their governments use anti-terror legislation to suppress legitimate dissent on contentious policy issues that have nothing to do with terrorism. Bait and switch.