ALTERNET– What is supposed to be a forum for deliberation and the development of
agreements on global economic governance was an utter failure. In the end, over
a billion dollars was spent to build a temporary system of apartheid in Toronto
to keep protesters out so that the twenty most wealthy countries in the world
could agree to disagree on what to do about the state of the global economy.
Somewhere between a billion and two billion dollars was spent in the end on the G20 in Toronto (and the G8 meeting in Huntsville). It was used to create a fake lake, a fence around the city (a veritable apartheid wall) to keep protesters out, and it was used to enforce a regulation that gave police secret arrest powers that never went through the legislature.
The Toronto Star reported:
“the regulation kicked in Monday and will expire June 28, the day after the summit ends. While the new regulation appeared without notice on the province’s e-Laws online database last week, it won’t be officially published in The Ontario Gazette until July 3 — one week after the regulation expires.
According to the new regulation, “guards” appointed under the act can arrest anyone who, in specific areas, comes within five metres of the security zone.
Within those areas, police can demand identification from anyone coming within five metres of the fence perimeter and search them. If they refuse, they face arrest. Anyone convicted under the regulation could also face up to two months in jail or a $500 maximum fine.
The security was characterized by Toronto Star’s Catherine Porter as “the Miami Model.” The reference goes back to seven years ago when the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit took place.
Porter explained that “Manny Diaz, Miami’s then-mayor, called the police methods exemplary–a model to be followed by homeland security when confronting protesters” while “human rights groups including Amnesty International called it a model of police brutality and intimidation.”
From an interview with Naomi Archer, an indigenous rights worker from North Carolina, Porter outlined how the main identifiers of the “Miami Model” are: information warfare, intimidation, always suggesting the protesters triggered the violence, and congratulating themselves after all is said and done no matter what brutality took place at their hands.
State Repression of Journalists, G20 Protesters
The following is just a handful or small combination of the many videos and first-hand written accounts from those who were there at the G20 in Toronto attempting to exercise the right to assemble peacefully and protest.
-Amy Miller, independent journalist, discusses the threats of rape that were made against women in the detention center. She also details how guards in the center were strip-searching, traumatizing and sexually abusing prisoners by fingering some of the women who had been detained.
Amy Miller – Alternative Media Centre, Independent Journalist (VIDEO)
-Stefan Christoff, an independent journalist who was targeted prior to the G20 and featured on last Friday’s edition of Democracy Now! details the attacks on protesters who gathered for jail solidarity actions outside the detention center.
-A Guardian journalist (a newspaper from the UK) was assaulted, arrested, as were numerous others even if they had press credentials to prove they were “legitimate” members of the press who had a right to be covering the police and the protesters
-A large march and rally against the meeting of the G20 ended in police attacks against peaceful protesters and video journalist Brandon Jourdan in Queens Park.
-Community organizers, while on the way to a press conference, were targeted by plainclothes officers refusing to show badge numbers or identification.
-Calls to Amnesty International were made to report on the “illegal, immoral and dangerous” conditions at the detention center, where detained protesters were being held up to 35 hours without food, refused water or given as little as an ounce every 12 hours, subjected to “over-filled” cages, delayed processing, put into solitary confinement, refused the use of pillows or mattresses, forced to endure non-stop light exposure/loss of natural light rhythm/sensory deprivation (interrogation techniques used on Guantanamo detainees), subjected to extreme cold (another interrogation technique used on Guantanamo detainees), and sexually harassed.
There were peaceful protests. Most likely, few saw these images unless they sought them out.
A video like the one above doesn’t match the idea that protesters were a danger to the well-being of small businesses, people in the city, and those who were failing to come to agreement on how to tackle the economic crisis.
That’s why the police probably used agents provocateurs; their needed to be at least one incident to justify the level of police state brutality being utilized against protesters.
The images and video of police cars up and flames have raised many questions. Given the history of agents provocateurs in Canada, Cory Doctorow explored the possibility that police had incited the violence that many have linked to black bloc protesters who were at the G20. (Global Research also has an article up looking at the shoes the police and the alleged provocateur were wearing.)
G20 Leaders’ “Final Communique”
This only scratches the surface of all that went on. Instead of focusing on each incident individually, what about considering all the security and repression in the context of the discussion at the G20? What were leaders deliberating behind the apartheid fence built to keep protesters out? Why was it so important that the protesters get nowhere near the site where leaders were discussing global economics?
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine who has been covering globalization, trade and disaster capitalism for more than a decade, explained on Democracy Now! on the Monday right after the G20 that she thought the “real crime scene” was “what actually happened at the summit on Sunday night.”
Klein explained that the “communiqué” would not levy even a measly tax on banks to help pay for the global crisis banks had created and prevent future crises. No financial transaction tax to create fund for social programs and action on climate change would be created. And, Klein added, “real action to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel companies” that they have created many social and environmental problems for the world would not take place.
On what the G20 did do, Klein said:
“”What there would be was very decisive action on deficit reductions. These leaders announced that they would halve their deficits by 2013, which is shocking and brutal cut. You know, I don’t believe–maybe some of the leaders intend on keeping–making good on this promise, but, on the other hand, they can hide behind this promise as the excuse to do what a lot of them want to do anyway, and say, you know, “We have no choice; we made this commitment.” But so, just to put this in perspective, if the US were to cut its deficit, its projected 2010 deficit, in half by 2013, that would be a cut of $780 billion, you know, if there were no tax increases in that period.
So, you know, that’s why I wrote the piece that came out this morning in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, that what actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s poor, with the people who are most vulnerable, because that is really who’s going to pay, when they balance their budgets on the backs of healthcare programs, pension programs, unemployment programs. And also, the other thing that they did at this G8 summit, that preceded the G20 summit, is admit that they were not meeting their commitments to doubling aid to Africa, once again, because of the debt that was created by saving the banks.”
Indigenous natives of Canada reminded all protesters that indigenous rights are the first to go and the first people to be impacted because of the policies that the leaders in the G20 push and promote.
Arthur Manuel, former chief of the Neskonlith Band in British Columbia and spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade, explained on Democracy Now!:
“…basically indigenous people are the first ones that are impacted by the major sort of resource extraction-type industries that these big conferences actually, you know, engender in their strategies, you know? And so, we have to let–you know, we are part of the whole process, you know, in the sense that we’re the people that are hurt at the community level, in terms of hunting and fishing and food gathering that we depend on. It doesn’t matter if it’s just North America, but it could be anywhere, in Central, South America, in Asia, you know, all around the world. There’s like 370 million indigenous people globally, you know?…”
Indigenous people have been challenging the environmental impacts of “proposed massive pipelines that would carry Canadian tar sands oil 2,000 miles from northern Alberta all the way down to refineries in Texas and tankers off the Gulf Coast.” Not surprisingly, BP is trying to get into the dirty energy game of tar sands or resource extraction and environmental degradation of land in Canada.
In the end, what the National Post wrote about the G20 as it concluded may bemost apt:
“…the Toronto summits represent a near total collapse of efforts to create some kind of overarching centre of global economic power. Despite repeated reference to strong collective commitments to international cooperation, sustainable development and macroeconomic co-ordination, the G8/G20 separately and jointly agreed to go their own ways and avoid collective action as much as possible.
On everything from deficit reduction to climate change, from financial regulation to trade, foreign aid, currencies and Afghanistan, the G20 ultimately marched off in 20 separate directions.
Reality trumped fantasy in Toronto, the fantasy being that leaders can legally or would even want to commit their nations to the objectives of an unelected collective of political leaders from the four corners of the world — as if leaders from China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere could set global policy by some kind of balloted consensus at a weekend meeting. Mr. Harper, in his wrap-up news conference yesterday, acknowledged the pre-eminence of national sovereignty. Everything the G20 does is “voluntary,” he said in answer to a question about the deficit targets. “Everything is voluntary that we do here, because we are sovereign countries.” U.S. President Barack Obama put it more starkly: “Every country is unique, and every country will chart its own course”…
Over ten thousand community activists engaged in a US Social Forum in Detroit. Over ten thousand regularly engage in World Social Forums that have been organized since January 2001 when the first Forum was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Those who have participated in the World Social Forums or the US Social Forums in the past decade know every country is not unique and every country should not chart its own course.
All humanity is connected. What one country does has repercussions in all the countries of the world.
That any leader would utter such quotes that appeal to an ideology supportive of unilateralism and conflict is unacceptable and should be loudly condemned by all the people of the world.
Yet, that’s the story of the G20–Twenty leaders coming together to say what they want for their country. Twenty leaders ultimately agreeing to disagree and let each country carry out their own agenda. Twenty leaders planning to meet again to do the same and to drop a billion more dollars to militarize the area outside of where the next meeting will be.
Twenty leaders displaying utter disregard for humanity, a love for free trade or global capitalism, and tacit support for police state repression so they can decide to not agree in peace.
Twenty leaders who don’t want to be inconvenienced by the pratfalls of the global economy they have created, who are perfectly okay with forcing those that they govern to foot the tab for their excess and bourgeois view of how to handle the political and economic future of the world.
Kevin Gosztola is a trusted author for OpEdNews.com who has sought refuge in Chicago from the red state of Indiana for four years now but who has over the past years contemplated returning to help kickstart a real progressive movement in northern Indiana where he was born. He publishes to United Progressives, The Seminal, Open Salon and recently launched a blog on Alternet called Moving Train Media. He is a 2009 Young People For Fellow and a documentary filmmaker who will graduate with a Film/Video B.A. degree from Columbia College in Chicago in the Spring 2010. He co-organized a major arts & media summit called “Art, Access & Action,” which explored the intersection of politics, art and media and was supported by Free Press. He covered the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He covered the controversy around Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame’s graduation, Operation Rescue’s “Keep It Closed Campaign” against Dr. Carhart, the “Showdown in Chicago,” the Tea Party rally in Chicago, and actions against the Arizona immigration law & several past antiwar rallies in Chicago. He is also a member of the Media Democracy Day Think Tank in Chicago. Kevin Gosztola most recently covered the US Social Forum in Detroit extensively. He doesn’t just write and blog about movements and struggles; he is part of those movements and struggles.
Photo by Abby Martin
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