Neither ostriches bury their heads in the sand nor lemmings commit mass suicide, these are popular myths now disproven. But humans do both and nothing like the G8 Summit to exemplify such behaviours.
As usual, the G8 will gather shortly after the meeting of the Bilderberg Club, to rubber stamp unofficial proposals made during unaccountable discussions amongst mostly unelected power holders. But the G8 is all about representation of the people, at least in appearance as the governments of the world’s eight wealthiest countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Russia get together to design international policy.
In 2012 the G8 members held 50.1% of the global nominal GDP and 40.9% of the global GDP. This in itself already points to who’s interests the talks will serve. The holder of the rotating presidency, being this year the UK, sets the agenda, hosts the summit for that year, and determines which ministerial meetings will take place. The British PM has been delivering great soundbites such as ‘transparency’ to stop corruption of firms hiding assets in Tax Havens (one would have thought the massive surveillance operations just made public would be able to help here) resisted by Bermudas and other ‘Treasure Islands’ and ‘eliminating world hunger’ based on partnerships with food giants (Monsanto amongst them) following basic neoliberal dogma, already being assessed as likely to make hunger worse in developing countries by increasing the already massive shift of assets from poor to rich nations. Bill Gates has congratulated Britain for this effort to end world hunger, unsurprisingly one might add.
Nobody is saying ‘may be we should rethink free market dogma’. Reorganising the system to progressively eliminate speculation which, producing nothing, concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, does not seem to be in the cards. Regulation of the Banking system to put it at the service of investment for production, employment and human well being is nowhere to be seen. Promoting new models of corporate structure with workers participation both in decision making and profits would probably be consider a good after (very expensive) dinner joke. And so on, our ‘representatives’ at the G8 Summit are burying their heads in the sand as the system they are putting their faith in becomes more and more irreparable, creating suffering for millions of people. The lemmings are forced to jump into the sea, not to commit suicide but to look for new habitats. We humans have the intelligence and the tools to find new ways of doing things without committing suicide or killing others in the process, and there are alternatives.
