Bird’s-Eye: With an overflowing mail folder on the G20, we’ve broken the topic into three sections: what happened inside the conference, what happened on the streets, and photo/videos. We start with the Globe and Mail, in which Gerald Caplin (who’s he?) explaining what filters you need to read the government PR. Then from the Guardian, John Hilary explains why he hopes that this G20 may be the last. And from the New York Times, Paul Krugman looks at the disastrous economic course the G20 has chosen to follow.
* Ten Invaluable Tips For Assessing The G8 – The Globe And Mail (Thanks, Kyla!)
What do you call those who have the capacity to reduce hunger, poverty and disease with a stroke of the pen, and fail to act? What do you call those who are knowingly responsible for causing death and suffering to millions of fellow citizens? What do you call those who deny to the poor the benefits that we in the rich world take for granted? You call them the G8.
* May Toronto’s G20 Be The Last John Hilary The Guardian (Thanks, Gabe!)
Questions are being asked as to why the police chose to drive the vehicles into the middle of a group of protesters and then abandon them, and why there was no attempt to put out the flames until the nation’s media had been given time to record the scenes for broadcast around the world.
The fact that so much attention has been directed towards the policing is largely due to the lack of anything newsworthy coming out of the summit itself. Even David Cameron, attending for the first time as British prime minister, published his own desperate plea in the Canadian press this week for summits to be turned into something more than the hot air and photo opportunities they have been in the past. (How this relates to his stated intention to take time out to watch the second half of the England v Germany game with Angela Merkel was not made clear.)
* The Third Depression Paul Krugman New York Times
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — [but] we are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending….
Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine….
