Workers to heads of G20: Creating a better world order is no more your business

PRESS RELEASE
15 November 2008

Relegating the world’s future to the hands of same leaders who created the current global economic crisis is a recipe to further disaster, according to Partido ng Manggagawa, a militant labor party in the country which joined hundreds of other protesters in a march to the US embassy this morning in time for the G20 Summit in Washington DC.

Partido ng Manggagawa chair, Renato Magtubo, said today’s summit by the G8 + 12, an elite club of the world’s richest economies, to formulate strategy to fight the current global economic crisis, “will, to borrow from Barack Obama’s famous line against John McCain, ‘only produce more of the same.’”

“Since this is just another summit of free traders and free marketeers, workers expect no relief from this kind of meeting whose main agenda is to save corporate America and Europe and not Joe the plumber and Juana Manggagawa,” said Magtubo, a veteran trade union leader and former party-list representative.

Magtubo pointed out that for this summit to be relevant to those who really create the world’s wealth—the working class—G20 leaders must renounce neoliberal economics and proclaim a new public policy on redistributing wealth. “Without it, the summit will be a mere talking shop,” the labor leader said.

The labor leader explained that despite the current economic turmoil, the world’s wealth is still more than enough to feed, house, clothe, educate, and care for the needs of some six billion people.

“The world’s productive capacity is so vast it can produce in abundance all the goods and services needed by the world’s people. The only problem is that the world’s wealth is in the hands of a few people, who in the past decades invested their surpluses in casino capitalism and not in the real economy,” added Magtubo.

Magtubo stressed further that the summit was made more anomalous when G20 made it a super exclusive meeting as if these 20 heads of states hold the key to the salvation of six billion people.

“They will talk about bailouts that make financial sharks happy but not the poor people whom they have driven deep down the world of indebtedness. They will provide a stimulus package to resurrect the dead stock markets but not the real economy that provides jobs to billions of people,” said Magtubo.

Citing massive job loss in the US and in Europe and which is also happening now in the country’s export processing zones, Magtubo said a separate world summit of trade unions and labor leaders is more appropriate in working out a strategy for saving the people and the planet from the cruelty of the capitalist system. ###