The G20 Austerity Agenda

By Lucid and Mike Roy, We Are Change London

December 22, 2010 LONDON

Mike Roy interviewed by Sumbal Sabah of CHRW Radio about the G20 and the G20 protest organized by Roy in Victoria Park, London Ontario.

“The implications of what the G20 does affects our lives here in Canada and around the world. You can see the kinds of things happening here now because of the last G20 in Toronto, for example, they set goals and budgets and they’re now implementing austerity in places like France and the United Kingdom.

In France, they’ve simply raised the age of retirement by 2 years and ironically the next day they’ve got a million people on the streets protesting. The United Kingdom has decided to cut the education budget by 40%, increasing tuition by 3 times. The students on the day before, (the vote), there were over fifty thousand students on the streets taking over government buildings. But these are the kinds of things that the G20 tries to implement on it’s own member countries.

The G20 is basically 20 countries and each country either has elected or unelected finance ministers. China for example obviously doesn’t have an elected finance minister, he’s appointed. Then each country also sends it’s appointed banking head. Canada sends its appointed head Mark Carney. He ironically worked for Goldman Sachs for 13 years, and this is the kind of culture that these people come from. If anyone knows anything about Goldman Sachs, they seem to have their fingers in every single pie that’s out there.

The membership of the G20 is bank heads, finance ministers and the IMF and World Bank are key players as well. They’re not an elected party, they’re bankers and high ranking corporations that collude their best interests. Businesses are out there to profit obviously, but at what expense?

In some situations some workers may gain a little bit but in the big picture most workers lose. Mexico for example thought they were going to have a windfall but their economy is worse than the United States.

These kinds of people, they’re the big business guys. They’re not really interested in the little people, the Mom and Pa’s, even the mid sized businesses. They’re more interested in the large multinationals being able to operate without tariffs. They’re interested in the natural resources in the areas. They’ll play around with some labor laws trying to make things look good in certain areas but I’ve never really seen any good come out of anything they’ve done in any country that they’ve done anything in, especially any of the IMF countries.

Take the World Bank, in the Asian countries, with the crisis kicking in in the mid 90s the IMF and the World Bank were in there fast, handing out loans to countries that were already indebted, making them even more heavily indebted. When it came time to pay these loans back, countries couldn’t do it, so the IMF tried to extend their loans a bit, but in exchange they would have to give over their industry and have the corporations come in and open up their business. That’s the way it’s been going and I don’t see it changing because it’s in their best interests.

Now they’re trying to implement austerity in countries, cutting back on social programs and at the same time they expect other countries not to set up any kind of boundaries, there’s no protectionism. They want to eliminate the tariffs and boundaries. In some instances it’s not such a bad thing but for example a company that I work for, Bell Canada. If it wasn’t for us, Canada, setting up boundaries early on to protect this infant industry, I wouldn’t be working for a company like Bell Canada, I’d be working for an American company like Western Express. But we expect these other countries not to do what we have done.

When you have something like a communications industry for example, or a resource company being sold to foreign interests, you have a security threat, you have sensitive information, you have resources that should belong to the people within the country, but those boundaries are being eliminated. This is also what the G20 is, seeking to eliminate these boundaries and creating a beautiful global movement. But say for example a communications company was sold to a foreign interest; a. Who knows what would happen to the jobs here in Canada. b. Who knows what could happen with the security of that information. c. As a democratic society we wouldn’t even have the ability to make a decision about this because the decisions would be made off shore.

Out in Alberta we’ve got a lot of arable land and they produce a lot of potash that is used for things like fertilizer, and we export a lot of that. Right now there’s a debate going through about whether to sell that to a foreign company. That’s a natural resource and that really should belong to Canada not to a foreign company or a foreign country even. We should set some sort of precedent up by protecting that natural resource and our industries.

I was down there, at the G20, because if things like that go through, it sets precedents. Then who knows, Bell Canada may get bought out by AT&T

I am not a disbeliever in globalization, it’s just the way that it’s being carried out. It ties in with capitalism. Everyone’s sort of against capitalism right now, but I think that what people don’t realize is that we’re in a Keynesian form of capitalism, we’re actually in a bad form of capitalism. There are different forms of capitalism just as there are different forms of socialism or communism. I think we need a fair trade system rather than a free trade system.”

Watch the video HERE