G-20

Jody sent me a link to a story about the riot at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh last month. I went poking around for some more information about the G-20 and I stumbled over this little pamphlet: Meet The G That Killed Me (16 pages). It gives a pretty clear explanation of just what's going on. It does give a couple of paragraphs to the social injustice of it all, but the opinions are clearly separated from the facts. I give it an A+.

The crux of the matter:

"Needless to say, these policy prescriptions have not helped to stabilize developing economies. Instead these IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies have caused even further destabilization for developing economies. And more significantly, they have opened the doors for multinational corporations to come into developing countries to exploit people and resources.

"IMF loans rarely turn out to be ‘quick fixes’ for developing countries facing severe economic trouble. Instead, as debtor nations are unable to pay up on the impossible terms of their loans they sink deeper and deeper in debt falling into a condition of perpetual debt."

I don't know how true that is, but I do suspect these guys of lending money to charlatans who just take it and spend it on themselves instead of investing it in their economy like they are supposed to. Foolish IMF.

As to whether the G-20 is really evil or not, well, of course they are. They haven't given ME a billion dollars. And the numbers mentioned don't strike me as all that big. The biggest one was $750 billion. Didn't we (the US Government) shell out more than that to shore up our own collapsing economy? Or was that the amount we gave DOD to spend on black projects?