The G20 Plan for Prosperity: Rubber Bullets and Shredded Social Safety Net

[marmar]

via MichaelMoore.com:



July 14th, 2010 12:26 PM
The G20 Plan for Prosperity: Rubber Bullets and Shredded Social Safety Net
Police brutality at the G-20 protests in Toronto targeted freedom of speech and assembly, putting world’s poor and working people on notice.

By Paul Jay / New Deal 2.0


The Toronto G-20 summit sent a message to poor and working people in Europe and North America. “You will pay for the global financial crisis through cuts to your social safety nets. There will be no taxing of those who actually caused the crisis and made fortunes in the various bubbles over the last decades.”

Of course not in so many words — what they said was they had committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce government debt-to-GDP ratios by 2016. That means austerity plans, which was pretty much what was on the agenda before the countries got there.

This was bad enough. But there was another message, too, sent through the Canadian police: “If you don’t like it, how about a rubber bullet?” It looks like G-20 countries will deal with opposition to their plans through martial law and police brutality.

I was there in Toronto, where police turned the downtown center into something resembling martial law. The invocation of an archaic piece of legislation called the “Public Works Protection Act” at the G20 site essentially suspended probable cause, giving police the rights of search and seizure to anyone, anywhere in the area. In other parts of the city peaceful demonstrators were charged with “conspiracy to commit mischief” and “disturbing the Queen’s peace”.

Canadians learned that there was no right to freedom of assembly and no freedom of speech as long as extraordinary measures could be rationalized.

And what were the circumstances? Well, in the midst of twenty thousand peaceful demonstrators were around one hundred people dressed in black (known as the Black Bloc tactic). At a certain point on Saturday afternoon, they broke away from the main protest march, and ran up and down Yonge Street breaking windows. Four police cars were trashed and burned. There is evidence a few of the cars were abandoned by police for hours before they were set upon. On one such car, protesters painted the words “bait”. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/g20-plan-prosperity-rubber-bullets-and-shredded-social-safety-net