Leaders of the G8/G20, including President Obama, are meeting in Toronto beginning Friday.
CLAYTON THOMAS-MULLER
DALLAS GOLDTOOTH
Currently in Toronto, Thomas-Muller is Tar Sands Campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network. He said today: “The G20 is continuing down a road of business as usual for big oil. The Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada is an enormous project with a devastating impact on indigenous people, other rural people and virtually all life in the area. It’s like a massive slow-motion oil spill.” Photos of the Alberta Tar Sands are available here.
Goldtooth is at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, a gathering of activists; he is media coordinator for the Network and is able to connect media to other indigenous activists, including from the Gulf affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
MELINDA ST. LOUIS
LIDY NACPIL, via Hayley Hathaway
The Jubilee USA Network, an alliance of 75 religious denominations and faith communities, labor, environmental, and human rights groups and development agencies, just issued a progress report titled “Making the Grade? The G20’s Commitment to the World’s Poorest.” The report finds that G20 leaders “have made shockingly little progress since their last summit on development commitments and calls on leaders to take bold action to support the world’s poorest at a gathering of world leaders this week.”
According to the group: “The scorecard evaluates the G20’s progress toward key commitments made at the conclusion of its first summit on the global economic crisis in April 2009. New analysis shows that, in the past nine months since the G20’s September summit in Pittsburgh, only $1.2 billion in additional money has been clearly accounted for and delivered to low-income countries — an amount equivalent to money spent by the Canadian government for the upcoming three-day G8/G20 summits.”
St. Louis is deputy director of the Jubilee USA Network. For the full report and a news release from the group, “G20 Gets ‘D’ Grade for Breaking Commitments to the World’s Poorest,” see the group’s web page: jubileeusa.org.
Nacpil, who is based in the Philippines, is with the affiliated Jubilee South Asia/Pacific Movement on Debt and Development. She said today: “We believe that any process to address the global economic and financial crisis should include the voices of all affected peoples and nations. The G20 is not that process. However, as long as the biggest economies of the world are meeting, they should use their time to address the flaws of the global economic and financial system and take bold steps to transform the system.” Nacpil is currently in Detroit at the U.S. Social Forum.
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858
