“This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms….” — T.S. Eliot
I understand there was a conglomeration of global bigwigs recently not all that far from my expatriate digs here in Brenda’s Blighty. I meant to pop round and say cheerio, but couldn’t seem to find the time. The UK newspapers were full of it (no pun intended, of course, oh no, not at all): reams and reams of coverage devoted to the preening trumpery of stuffed shirts and hollow men, headpieces filled with straw. Having missed it all, I positively despaired at the thought of wading through the gray goo and trying to figure out the deathless import of this “historic conference.” But fortunately, George Monbiot has obtained a “compressed form” of the official communique of the learned Thebans, cutting through the cant to the rather cankered heart of the matter. From the Guardian:
Here is the text of the G20 communique, in compressed form:
“We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don’t possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth’s living systems. Now we’re going to spend another $1.1 trillion.
As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.
Oh – and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don’t have any definite plans as yet, but we’ll think of something in due course.”
Or to put it even more succinctly:
“G20 to Working People and the Earth: Drop Dead.”