Join the G8 protests


Make poverty history

Fight for socialism

G8: Make capitalism history, fight for socialism logoTENS
OF thousands of people are making plans to travel to Scotland at the
beginning of July to demonstrate against world poverty.

Sarah Sachs-Eldridge

The representatives of the world’s rich elite, the G8, will be
meeting in a five-star luxury hotel in Gleneagles. In the four days that
they are there, 120,000 African children will die from poverty, caused
by the profit system which these politicians support

Explaining why the US would not be increasing its aid to Africa, Bush
said, "It doesn’t fit our budgetary process" – a process which
includes a plan to waste almost half a trillion dollars on military and
war this year.

In A Blueprint for Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank Brett
Schaeffer, of the arch-conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation,
argues against providing more aid to the poorest countries on the
planet. He claims if countries will not embrace policies which free up
trade, then their economic situation will not change no matter how much
aid is poured in.

Fraudulent claim

Schaeffer points to "heavy state intervention" as one of
the crimes of poor countries which stand in the way of what he sees as
healthy economic development. Apparently he fails to see any irony in
this claim.

American cotton farmers receive $3.9 billion (£2 billion) a year in
government subsidies – more than the entire GDP of Benin (161 out of the
world’s 177 poorest countries) and three times the annual amount the US
gives in aid to Africa.

ISR Demonstrating against the war on Iraq 19 March 2005The
WTO has ruled that this huge chunk of state intervention is illegal, but
aid agencies believe that the Bush administration has little intention
of scrapping it.

These enormous subsidies to mainly the richest farmers in the US are
certainly one of the causes of the huge economic chasm between the rich
and poor. When this is coupled with the privatisation schemes, massive
exploitation and oppression of workers and poor by the multinational
corporations it goes some way to explaining poverty.

Gordon Brown is asking us to go on bended knee to Edinburgh to beg
the G8 leaders to help the poor in Africa. But the G8 are incapable of
making poverty history. They do the bidding and ease the way of the
fat-cat corporations who salivate at the thought of privatising and
profiteering throughout the world from the poorest to the richest
countries.

Come and demonstrate at the G8 summit. Come to the ISR international
youth camp and march with us behind our banner. If we want to make
poverty history we have to make the system which presides over it
history. Capitalism is based on profit and sustaining the profit system.

Make capitalism history. Make socialism our future!