Make the G8 history
DEAN MAR EACHDRAIDH AN G8
Fatta al’historia lo G8
HACE EL G8 HISTORIA
Faites à l’histoire le G8
Lass das G8 Geschichte werden
Go to Scotland Sim, Fortuna Mall or to the Anti FN building on Porcupine and place suggestions for SLLU demonstration against the G8.
Overview of RL demos in Rostock Germany in June this year:
http://www.smallurl.info/?r=1yd
This Edition:
A Global Rebellion!
Introduction to the G8 (What they are all about)
Networks to contact
VIDEOS OF G8 2005
"We Have a President Who is a Utopian" Video - Seymour Hersh: Mario Savio Memorial Lecture
Chavez – Subs and oil
Cuba Embraces Open-Source Software
VIDEO: The Corporation
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World By Michael Parenti
Bush all set to attack Iran: Report
Poverty gap in US has widened under Bush (Taken from The Independent)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.": Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), US civil rights leader
G8 2007 Rostock Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvzpfOUPMMs
From 6-8 June 2007, the G8 Summit – the meeting of the heads of state and government of the USA, Canada, Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia – will take place in Heiligendamm in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Germany’s Baltic Sea. The Summit location is the Kempinski Grand Hotel.
In June this year, the leaders of the world’s richest countries gather in Germany to hatch deals that will ensure corporations, working at home and abroad, are not hampered by trade union or health and safety legislation, trade barriers, human rights laws or pollution penalties.
The G8 will plead its commitment to tackling poverty, but in reality it will plan worldwide imposition of privatisation. From the UK’s NHS to water provision in parched African countries, the G8 will help corporations raid whatever they can for profit.
The G8 will conspire with the arms companies and oil corporations - for whom soldiers from our communities are sent to Iraq to kill and be killed.
The G8 will make platitudes about fair trade, but at the same time help giant global companies like Asda/Wal-Mart drive independent banana producers out of business in Central America and ruin small town high streets.
Think the G8 is all about Africa? It is. But it’s all about you, too. It’s about all of us.
Grant the Rulers No Calm: A Global Rebellion
June 2007. A massive group of demonstrators from all over Europe and the rest of the world, gathers together and marches through the streets of Rostock to protest against the G8 summit meeting. Tens of thousands greet the heads of state as they arrive at the airport and block the grand summit location, Heiligendamm. Again and again imaginative and resourceful actions disrupt the order of the day and the scheduled events for the summit meeting. The focal point of the public is not on the communications of the economically powerful but on the multitudinous voices of the protests and of the sites of resistance.
Those who cannot make it, protest at Governor Linden’s House on SL en-masse – watched by the world and in-world press. Anti corporation banners mix with socialist, anti-capitalist and religious ones.
The announcements about the actions taking place against the G8 summit meeting next year could read something along these lines. It would not be entirely surprising if the events wound up running something along the lines of what is outlined above. The possibility of such a scenario grows out of the protests in Seattle, Prague, Genoa, Scotland and Florence and is a practical result of the debates that have taken place in a variety of social fora over the past few years amongst radical leftists and those critical of capitalist globalization in Germany, in Europe and around the world. In this summit, countless local battles that have been fought worldwide come together.
The mobilization against the 2007 G8 summit ties in with experience gleaned from past summit protests and also in other struggles, such as in the recent and ongoing struggles in Oaxaca. These experiences are based on initiatives that contrast the systematic disenfranchisement through capitalist globalization with the globalization of social, cultural, economic and political rights. These initiatives come into relation with resistance against military interventions as well as with resistances against the day-to-day intensifications of the regime of work and exploitation. Where these struggles cross paths, even if they reveal contradictions, they raise the demand for a free right to life.
There can be no dialogue with the G8
In the radicalization and expansion of these initiatives the question will also be asked anew about a break from a system based on property and ownership and on domination through class, patriarchy, race and imperialism. The world is still not that different from the one that the history of class struggles will create of it. In other words, we can only create an alternative when we have freed ourselves from these divisions.
Wherever the representatives of capitalist globalization gather, whether in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank or the G8, the actors and creators of new and global movements of resistance arrive and decidedly show the representatives of the neoliberal economic order their bare teeth. It should and will not be any different in June 2007 at the Baltic Sea, when the heads of state for the eight most powerful economic and industrialized nations of the world gather together in Heiligendamm.
For while these summits pretend to be the legitimate and legitimated representatives of the so-called “civilized world”, the G8 dominated world suffers war, poverty and calamity, worldwide attacks on social and humanitarian rights, the continuing destruction of the environment and a politics of torture and of depriving people of their rights.
We decidedly take the right from the G8 to make decisions that affect the daily reality of our lives and we refuse a dialogue even if the G8 actually could attain legitimacy. If the G8 promises to create and secure world order, then they attain recognition only because millions worldwide are threatened with insecurity. For precisely this reason, one goal of the mobilizations is to put the alleged legitimacy of the G8 into question, to erode and lastly destroy it.
That is why we must respond to the global destabilization of means of survival and we must find answers to the daily drive towards competition. To this, only answers other than those of the neo-liberal discourse can respond. And, on this we are certain, the answers must be different than the answers that have existed previously for leftists and for social movements. No doubt about it, class exploitation, patriarchal and racist domination continue. But those of the exploited classes have to a large extent been dissolved into a profoundly discriminating hierarchy of precarity. And “difference” and “subjectivity” have been co-opted and re-instrumentalized as part of the arsenal of the neoliberal war.
Ya basta! – Together and in Solidarity
We know that a social alternative does not come about through leftist radical rhetoric but rather that it must be related through praxis to the struggles. We assume that this cannot be achieved solely by one movement or another alone. Therefore, before, during and after Rostock, we want to work together and come into communication with activists from the social protests, the environmental and peace movements, the movements critical of capitalist globalization, the activists in leftist unions and those working towards human rights, those who are part of migrants’ self-organizations, and the traditional, alternative and militant currents of the left. To what extent this will be successful, depends first and foremost on the solidarity of all the participants to one another, the reliability on agreement, the mutual acceptance and respect of different forms of action and expression.
The Interventionist Lefts seeks actions of solidarity, of the common Ya Basta! It’s enough! We participate in trans-regional as well as local alliances and networks, in order to mobilize for Rostock and Heiligendamm, in order to connect local demonstrations with global struggles. Therefore, we participate in all the demonstrations, days of action and counter-activities during the summit. We want to disrupt and block the arrival of the eight heads of state as much as the G8 summit in the Kempinski.
Introduction to the G8...
G8 stands for group of eight nations. It is an exclusive grouping of the political leaders of eight specific countries. It is not an institution, it has no constitution or charter, and it has no permanent secretariat or headquarters. These are of course the world's most industrialised, wealthy and powerful States.
The G8 began as a group of six countries at a time of significant global economic insecurity in the 1970's. The leaders of these countries would argue that they gathered, as the leading nations, in order to manage this crisis in the interests of global stability. A stability that of course ensured that they retained their power, with their interests at the heart of the global agenda and this has meant the nudging of the global economy in a direction which reinforces the supremacy of private and corporate interests over democratic and collective ones. (e.g. favouring privatisation, deregulation, capital mobility and the erosion of sovereign control over domestic economies)
The membership of the g8 has evolved over time to include the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Canada and the president of the European Union. The scope of the topics of discussion have also evolved from the first, supposedly one -off meeting that focussed on macro-economic policy. Now issues of security, trade, relations with developing countries and other trans-national issues and even domestic issues, such as employment have been discussed.
It is important to be clear that the G8 Summits are not a policy-making forum. They are a time for the leaders of these states to network and build relationships. They are a time to discuss complex international issues and crises, to allow for a more powerful collective response.
The co-ordination of these nations and their unequal influence over international institutions such as the WTO, IMF and G20 ensures that their interests dominate the world order.
As such the G8 Summits have always been a focus for protests and counter summits. Following the Peoples Global Action call for a united global day of action in 1998, the Summit protests have, however, grown and strengthened, forcing the G8 Summits to more and more remote locations with ever increasing security costs.
G8 Germany 2007 – http://g8-2007.de/
Networking structures & mobilizations in Germany 2007
Dissent! - Network of Resistance
left radical Network with a lot of different working groups such as bike caravan, Trauma support, Anti-repression, Infotour
www.dissentnetzwerk.org
No-Lager-Network
against all borders, for global rights - topic: migration
www.no-lager.de
Interventionistische Linke - IL
broad left network with different groups like attac
www.g8-2007.de
www.heiligendamm2007.de
Revolutionäres Bündnis
anti-imperalistic orientation
http://free.pages.at/nog8/home.html
Vision 07 / Karawahnsinn
contact: vision07@riseup.net
http://vision07.net/drupal
Mass demonstration and blockades
contact: blockade@g8-2007.de
Counter summit
contact: peter.wahl@weed-online.org
Working-group on Anti-repression
contact: gipfelsoli@nadir.org
German mailinglist
subscribe: g8-2007@lists.riseup.net
G8 Office in Berlin
open Wednesday & Thursday afternoon 14.00 -17.00
call: 0049-30-40985406 or 0176-62078158
G8 mobilisation in Hamburg
see: https://hamburg.dissentnetzwerk.org/MainEnglish/HomePage
Fascists:
There are also right-wing / fascist mobilisations against neoliberalism, globalisation and the G8, but for an emancipatory movement there can NEVER be any way of cooperation!!!
Issues & topics around the G8
theoretical texts about G8 and the resistance against it:
www.gipfelsoli.org/Inhalt+Theorie.html
www.gipfelsoli.org/Media+Tools/dissent_broschuere.pdf
Infosheets about G8 from a Canadian NGO
www.web.ca/acgc
A short history of the G8 (indymedia UK June/2005)
https://www4.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/06/314377.html
International mobilisation
Mailinglist for the international mobilisation
subscribe: g8-int-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
VIDEOS OF G8 2005:
Children of the Revolution! George Square 1919; G8 2005 - Revolution!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6voRU3eLQM
G8 Auchterarder Part one - March and entrapment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFUE9cXLb1Q
G8 Auchterarder part2 confrontation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKnLKJn8Uis
AD BREAK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flfvZ2B2H8w
"We Have a President Who is a Utopian"
Video - Seymour Hersh: Mario Savio Memorial Lecture
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17199.htm
We Are All Torturers Now!: 2 Minute video: Warning: This video contains graphic images and audio of torture and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15740.htm
Chavez preparing for conflict with US plans to buy 9 subs : Venezuela is currently negotiating with European and Russian companies the purchase of nine submarines valued in three billion US dollars for the event of “an attack from United States”, report several South American newspapers. http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9939&formato=HTML
Chavez signs decree to nationalize foreign oil companies: The decree allows Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, (PDVSA) to take a 60 per cent stake on May 1 in four projects which process crude oil into 600,000 barrels of synthetic oil a day in the country's eastern Orinoco River basin. http://snipurl.com/1bjlg
http://www.sun- sentinel. com/technology/ ats-ap_technolog y16feb18,
0,6181416. story
Cuba Embraces Open-Source Software By JOHN RICE
Associated Press Writer
February 18, 2007, 9:40 PM EST
HAVANA -- Cuba's communist government is trying to shake off the yoke
of at least one capitalist empire -- Microsoft Corp. -- by joining
with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source
software.
Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from
Microsoft's proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating
system, which is developed by a global community of programmers who
freely share their code.
"It's basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of
ideology," said Hector Rodriguez, who oversees a Cuban university
department of 1,000 students dedicated to developing open-source
programs.
Other countries have tried similar moves. China, Brazil and Norway
have encouraged the development of Linux for a variety of reasons:
Microsoft's near-monopoly over operating systems, the high cost of
proprietary software and security problems.
Cuban officials, ever focused on U.S. threats, also see it as a
matter of national security.
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, an old comrade-in-arms of
President Fidel Castro, raised suspicions about Microsoft's
cooperation with U.S. military and intelligence agencies as he opened
a technology conference this week.
He called the world's information systems a "battlefield" where Cuba
is fighting against imperialism.
He also noted that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described
copyright reformers -- including people who want to do away with
proprietary software -- as "some new modern-day sort of communists" --
which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.
Microsoft did not return calls seeking comment. Cuba imports many
computer preloaded with Windows and also purchases software in third
countries such as China, Mexico or Panama.
Valdes is a hard-liner who favors uniforms and military haircuts, but
the biggest splash at the conference was made by a paunchy, wild-
haired man in a T-shirt: Richard Stallman, whose Free Software
Foundation created the license used by many open-source programs,
including Linux.
Middle-aged communist bureaucrats and ponytailed young Cuban
programmers applauded as the computer scientist from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology insisted that copyright laws
violate basic morality; he compared them to laws that would threaten
people with jail for sharing or modifying kitchen recipes.
Stallman also warned that proprietary software is a security threat
because without being able to examine the code, users can't know what
it's doing or what "backdoor" holes developers might have left open
for future entry. "A private program is never trustworthy, " he said.
Cuba also has trouble keeping proprietary software current. Its
sluggish satellite link to the outside world makes downloads of
updates agonizingly slow. And U.S. companies, apparently worried
about American laws restricting trade with Cuba, are increasingly
blocking downloads to the island.
Cubans try to get around the problem by putting software updates on a
server located on the island. But many computers wind up unpatched
and vulnerable.
Cuba's Cabinet also has urged a shift from proprietary software. The
customs service has gone to Linux and the ministries of culture,
higher education and communications are planning to do so, Rodriguez
said.
And students in his own department are cooking up a version of Linux
called Nova, based on Gentoo distribution of the operating system.
The ministry of higher education is developing its own.
Rodriguez's department accounts for 1,000 of the 10,000 students
within the University of Information Sciences, a five-year-old school
that tries to combine software development with education.
Cuba is also training tens of thousands of other software and
hardware engineers across the country, though few have computers at
home. Most Cubans have to depend on the slow links at government
internet cafes or schools.
Rodriguez shied away from saying how long it would take for Cuba to
get most of its systems on Linux: "It would be tough for me to say
that we would migrate half the public administration in three years."
But he said Linux use was growing rapidly.
"Two years ago, the Cuban free-software community did not number more
than 600 people ... In the last two years, that number has gone well
beyond 3,000 users of free software and its a figure that is growing
exponentially. "
Even so, most of the computers at this week's technology conference
showed the red, green, blue and yellow Windows start button in the
bottom left-hand corner of their screens.
And the start of the open-source sessions was delayed as organizers
fiddled with the computer running their projector. The conference
room screen had been displaying the words "Windows XP."
The Corporation
This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit. Video.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12998.htm
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World
By Michael Parenti
There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17102.htm
Bush all set to attack Iran: Report:
The Bush administration's preparation to strike Iran is complete with the top commander of the US Central Command having received computerised plans for ‘Operation Iranian Freedom’, a report has said.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17098.htm
Iran: Minister briefs media on plans to avoid impact of sanctions on oil industry:
Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said here Saturday that to avoid the impact of sanctions on the country's oil industry, special plans have been drawn up, just as the industry has been expanding over the past 20 years despite sanctions.
http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0702177596201152.htm
===
Iran's top leader: Oil, gas reserves will dry up, Tehran needs to produce nuclear fuel:
"Oil and gas reserves won't last forever. If a nation doesn't think of producing its future energy needs, it will be dependent on domination-seeking powers," the television quoted Khamenei as saying.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/17/africa/ME-GEN-Iran-Nuclear.php
===
Poverty gap in US has widened under Bush (Taken from The Independent)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 27 February 2007
The number of Americans living in severe poverty has expanded dramatically
under the Bush administration, with nearly 16 million people now living on
an individual income of less than $5,000 (£2,500) a year or a family
income of less than $10,000, according to an analysis of 2005 official
census data.
The analysis, by the McClatchy group of newspapers, showed that the number
of people living in extreme poverty had grown by 26 per cent since 2000.
Poverty as a whole has worsened, too, but the number of severe poor is
growing 56 per cent faster than the overall segment of the population
characterised as poor - about 37 million people in all according to the
census data. That represents more than 10 per cent of the US population,
which recently surpassed the 300 million mark.
The widening of the income gap between haves and have-nots is nothing new
in America - it has been going on steadily since the late 1970s. What is
new, though, is the rapid increase in numbers at the bottom of the
socio-economic pile. The numbers of severely poor have increased faster
than any other segment of the population.
"That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began," one of
the McClatchy study's co-authors, Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth
University, said. "We're not seeing as much moderate poverty as a
proportion of the population. What we're seeing is a dramatic growth of
severe poverty."
The causes of the problem are no mystery to sociologists and political
scientists. The share of national income going to corporate profits has
far outstripped the share going to wages and salaries. Manufacturing jobs
with benefits and union protection have vanished and been supplanted by
low-wage, low-security service-sector work. The richest fifth of US
households enjoys more than 50 per cent of the national income, while the
poorest fifth gets by on an estimated 3.5 per cent.
The average after-tax income of the top 1 per cent is 63 times larger than
the average for the bottom 20 per cent - both because the rich have grown
richer and also because the poor have grown poorer; about 19 per cent
poorer since the late 1970s. The middle class, too, has been squeezed ever
tighter. Every income group except for the top 20 per cent has lost ground
in the past 30 years, regardless of whether the economy has boomed or tanked.
These figures are rarely discussed in political forums in America in part
because the economy has, in large part, ceased to be regarded as a
political issue - John Edwards' "two Americas" theme in his presidential
campaign being a rare exception - and because the right-wing think-tanks
that have sprouted and thrived since the Reagan administration have done a
good job of minimising the importance of the trends.
They have argued, in fact, that the poverty statistics are misleading
because of the mobility of US society. A small number of left-wing
think-tanks, such as the Economic Policy Institute, meanwhile, argue that
the census figures are almost certainly lower than the real picture
because many people living in extreme poverty do not answer census
questionnaires.
United States poverty league: States with the most people in severe poverty
California 1.9m
Texas 1.6m
New York 1.2m
Florida 943,670
Illinois 681,786
Ohio 657,415
Pennsylvania 618,229
Michigan 576,428
Georgia 562,014
North Carolina 523,511
Source: US Census Bureau
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