Financial G7 - Bankrupt.
Referring to the latest wave of ‘mega-mergers’ in America, The Guardian business leader last weekend rather inanely asked, “Should we care that we seem to be careering towards some sort of Blade Runneresque world, where a handful of corporations own and run absolutely everything?”

Welcome to the financial G7
The financial G7 brings together the central bank governors and finance ministers of the seven richest countries in the world. Some time ago the Financial Times commented (if corporations are the new gods)...“Central bankers are the masters now. Presidents and Prime Ministers may play at war and peace. They can prance abroad and posture at home. But money is different.....We are to put our trust instead in greyer men in darker suits.”
Each of these G7 central bankers sit on the board of directors of The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland, the central bank of central banks. The meetings of the ‘Basel Club’ are disturbed by nothing. During the Second World War, the BIS quietly carried on its activities, with bankers from both sides meeting under the presidency of Thomas McKittrick, an American who was ‘officially neutral’ in the conflict. Diplomatic immunity, courtesy of the Swiss government, no doubt comes in handy from time to time for these gentlemen.

Today, the total independence of the central banks from national governments has become a requirement of the ‘international financial community’. The new European Central Bank, for example, is totally protected under its statutes from political influence. Now that the global financial market determines the rules of the game, the role of central bankers is to ensure the efficient operation of the world financial system by adapting national finances to global policies. “Globalisation is not our enemy but our friend if, and only if, we are prepared for the journey it will take us on.” Blair ‘revealed’ to the City of London last March. “Some people are just better at moving than others”, advertised Mercedes-Benz.

For these celebrities of capitalism the show must go on, there is nothing else we can be, they say. The insanity inducing G8 programme to ‘save’ only half the worlds affected populations from death from already preventable hunger and disease in what is the ongoing genocide of 40,000 a day, 6 million every 150 days, is only exceeded in its fucked up-ness by setting the completion date half way into the next decade. The UK G8 presidency’s ‘Africa plan’ to double aid, if successful, will bring it level with one tenth of what America plans to be spending on its military this year.
And climate-change? With a likely tipping point of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reported last week to be ten years or less away, “irretrievably committing the world to disastrous changes including the failure of agriculture, major drought, rising sea levels... death of forests.....”, we can only find something else to be!

Give the central bankers and government tools a G8 welcome: Friday 4th February, 6pm, Lancaster House, The Mall, London.

Dissent! A Network of Resistance against the G8 - www.dissent.org.uk