Back in 1988 when Toronto hosted the G7 summit, the leaders of the seven top industrialized countries pledged to help the world’s poorest nations and called for major action to clean up the environment.
That was the guts of an eight-page communiqué issued by the leaders, including Brian Mulroney, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that was filled with self-congratulatory praise and glossed over the major controversies that threatened to disrupt the summit.
Tomorrow in L’Aquila, Italy, the leaders of what is now the G8 will issue a similar communiqué, much of it written weeks ago by faceless bureaucrats, filled with the same vacuous rhetoric and empty pledges to help the poor, protect the environment and solve many of the world’s other problems.
But the fact that the G8 leaders meeting this week in Italy are struggling with the same issues as they were in 1998 is a clear sign these summits, which cost more than $500 million to stage, are too often a waste of time and energy.
Indeed, in the 21 years since the Toronto summit, the gap between the richest and poorest nations has continued to increase; global warming has become a worsening problem; and some of the G8 policies, notably the move to unfettered free trade and globalization, may actually have exacerbated the current economic meltdown.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has it right.
[More]
The G8, first cousin to the same bunch of yahoos who run the corrupt and inept UN, provides nothing for the overall good of the world. What it does provide is a very expensive photo-op for all talk no action politicians to wine and dine themselves and in some instances their families on the taxpayers dollar. They scamble to get their pictures taken standing together to pose smiling like cats who just swallowed the canary. It also provides a wealth of pie in the sky material for lazy mediocre journalists (Hepburn in this instance an exception) to blather on about telling the uneducated masses how under the skillful all knowing hands of this bunch the world is soon going to be such a better place. I’d love to be able to read PMSH’s mind about what he thinks about having to associate with the likes of these people, Obama included.
Heck, I’d really like to have been able to read Putin’s mind after his meetings with Obama. How could he not compare their meeting to a grade school student Obama discussing politics with a university political science major graduate. I wonder how you translate ‘hahahaha the Americans must be f$$kin crazy to elect this punk’ from Russion to English.