The G8 meets to keep the global economy firmly in the hands of the capitalist elite
The watchdogs of the biggest world economies will hold a summit at Camp David May 18-19, meeting as the Group of Eight (G8). The heads of state are faced with the task of restructuring the system of corporate private property in the era of globalization.
The Obama administration moved the militarized presidential hideaway in the Maryland mountains after the Occupy movement planned to bring tens of thousands of protestors to Chicago, where the summit was first planned.
The heads of state find themselves between a rock and a hard place. As technology replaces more and more workers and wipes out more and more jobs, final demand is shrinking. Yet, the ceaseless drive for profit forces the owners of the corporations to drive down the cost of production by replacing workers with computerized machines.
As they eliminate jobs, cut government budgets, and drive down wages, these mega-capitalists deny their workers sufficient money to buy the goods they produce — and this undermines the whole capitalist system.
So globalization is worsening the divide between between rich and poor. The richest 50 individuals in the world collectively pay themselves more annual income than they do the poorest 416 million people. For the most part, these 50 capitalists live in the G8 countries, 20 in the United States alone.
They are the owners of corporations such as Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, Nike, Cemex, America Movil, and Grupo Mexico.
There is a straight correlation between the G8, poverty, and migration.
G8 policies foster the buying and selling of cheap labor between developed and underdeveloped countries—between global South and global North. The demand for cheap labor in the dominant, “developed” countries is supplied by the abundant cheap labor in subordinate, “underdeveloped” countries.
Global capitalists suck migrants into the world market to minimize the cost of production (and maximize their profits) — whenever and wherever the labor is needed.
Migration has become a central issue in the 21st century. More people are on the move now than at any other point in human history and their numbers are rising. Today some 214 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth, compared to 191 million as recently as 2005.
Global capitalism has turned one out of every 33 people into a migrant worker,.
In the countries where they immigrate, global migrant workers are the most vulnerable sector of the working class. They suffer the most blatant violations of human rights, and they work under the worst sweatshop conditions.
Attacked from all sides, global migrants have become the scapegoat for capitalism’s own failures. The capitalists’ divide-and-conquer strategy has painted a bull’s-eye on the back of migrant workers, turning them into hunted animals. Vigilante groups, ICE, and police agents hunt them down — at the border, on the job, in church, and at home.
Migration has become the catch-all scapegoat for domestic problems — the lack of jobs, the deteriorating public education, the inadequate health services. The anti-immigrant campaign prepared the ground for Arizona and other states to pass draconian immigration laws.
The United States is not alone in this; other countries have taken such measures.
The British parliament, for instance, passed one of the harshest of anti-immigrant laws in 2009. It penalizes undocumented immigrants with fines of $7,500 to $15,000 and allows immigration officials to imprison them for up to six months.
This attack on migrant workers cannot be allowed to continue. In May, thousands will demonstrate at the G8 summit, protesting not only unjustified wars and global warming, but also immigration policies that make of the undocumented an animal of prey.
Workers can no longer allow national boundaries to contain our struggle.
