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| − | <div style="text-align:center;"><br /><big>'''Welcome to {{SITENAME}}'''</big><br /> |
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| − | Wiki about the G-20 Summit slated for [[Pittsburgh]], [[Pennsylvania]], [[USA]] |
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| − | in September 2009. [[Help:Editing|Anyone can edit]] |
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| − | this wiki. [[Special:Allpages|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} articles]] |
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| − | <div style="text-align:center;"></div> |
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| − | <div style="text-align:center;">Pittsburghers are sure to understand that '''G-20 '''has nothing to do with [[Bingo]]</div> |
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| − | == Pittsburgh Public Schools close for G-20== |
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| − | http://post-gazette.com/pg/09232/992119-298.stm |
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| − | Half day on Wednesday and no school on Thursday and Friday. Football games are up in the air. |
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| − | == The next G-20 Summit organizing discussion is Tuesday, August 25 from 7:00 - 9:30pm at East Liberty Presbyterian Church (116 S. Highland Avenue, East Liberty). == |
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| − | For more information, call the Center at 412-361-3022 or e-mail us. And be sure to check out the TMC G-20 page for more information on upcoming efforts. |
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| − | == Freedom Conference == |
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| − | The organizational picnic was at North Park on Sunday, August 16, 2009, at 4:00 PM. This will be an opportunity to learn more about why we are staging the [[Freedom Conference]] and the impact we hope to make. Our group is assembled with participants from the [[9.12 Project]], [[Campaign for Liberty]], [[Pittsburgh Tea Party]], [[Republican Assembly]], and [[Veterans and Patriots United]] who are determined to show that the grassroots does make a difference. |
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| − | http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090831_hedges_pittsburgh_g20_defiance/ |
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| − | |||
| − | == Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire == |
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| − | By [[Chris Hedges]] |
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| − | Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the G-20. If we heed these dissident voices we have a future. If we do not we will commit collective suicide. |
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| − | The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists—none of whom will be inside their security perimeters—who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason. |
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| − | The longer we speak in the language of global capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the free market—even as we funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large corporations—the longer we live in a state of collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess to hate government and government involvement in the free market, who claim they are the defenders of competition and individualism, have been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn socialized medicine although we have become, at least for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth. The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we actually embrace has rendered us incapable of confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old language of markets, capitalism, free trade and globalization the longer the entities that created this collapse will cannibalize the nation. |
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| − | What are we now? |
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| − | What do we believe? |
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| − | What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? |
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| − | How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? |
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| − | How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? |
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| − | When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? |
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| − | When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good? |
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| − | Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency. |
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| − | Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by the Bail Out the People Movement. The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society. |
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| − | But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far denied protesters permits while it determines the size of the “security perimeter” it will impose around the world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of $9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class that is trashing the world’s economy. These elites will appear from behind closed doors with their communiqués and resolutions to address us in their specialized jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to convince us they have not lost control. They will make recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a knife into the backs of the working class. They will insist that the world can be managed and understood exclusively through their distorted lens of economics. But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have nothing left to say to us. |
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| − | “Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” |
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| − | If you can, go to Pittsburgh. This is an opportunity to defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in words that describe our reality. The power elite fear these words. If these words seep into the population, if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use to barrel us toward neofeudalism. And these words, when they become real, propel men and women to resist. |
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| − | “The end of something often resembles the beginning,” the philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “More often than not our nose-to-the-glass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization’s self-confidence—limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory—and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion. … Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation.” |
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| − | ==Op-Ed on G-20 from the Mosque Avenger== |
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| − | With the chronically feckless Democratic Party being recently buttressed by an equally useless [[Allegheny County Labor Council]] leadership, we now have two supposed defenders of working people comfortably ensconced in the back pocket of the corporate-dominated G-20 welcoming wagon. This historically tragic development begs the question as to who's left to address and counter the dismaying spectacle of Pittsburgh's primary economic and political institutions bending over backwards to indulge the very criminal class responsible for our collective misery? |
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| − | Story line after nauseating story line finds government, business and academic spokespeople, along with a few commoners, being downright giddy while touting the economic benefits and inestimable publicity expected to result from the September 24-25 gathering at the David Lawrence Convention Center. After all, why question the G-20's history or agenda when one is peddling them their green technology wares or praying that little Suzie's "Hi grandma" placard gets picked-up as the camera pans the rope line following a [[Matt Lauer]] interview from atop [[Mt. Washington]]. |
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| − | More realistically though is the likelihood that all these dubious promises of entrepreneurial cash-in and burgeoning civic pride are simply part of a more comprehensive White House-directed okey-doke with County Executive [[Dan Onorato]] and Mayor [[Luke Ravenstahl]] serving as needed provincial window dressing. Do any of us really believe that Italy's [[Silvio Berlusconi]] or Chinese President [[Hu Jinato\\ will be traipsing through [[Bloomfield]] or visiting an alt.energy start-up in some surrounding industrial park? |
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| − | The probable though less ostensible goal of this flim-flam is far more sinister. Capitalizing on the city's understandable enthusiasm over being site selected, the White House has successfully stifled any fourth estate inquiries into the unspeakable damage inflicted on the world's people and, in fact, the earth itself by the G-20's policies. [[Plant closings]], [[job outsourcing]], [[de-forestation]] and [[genetically-modified foods]] are only a handful of the crises left us by their pursuit of profit maximization. |
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| − | The more critical component of this media-assisted roll-out is the orchestrated attempt to demonize and marginalize [[dissent]]. By incessantly focusing on the up-coming security arrangements conspicuously linked to ever-looping references to the 1999 "Battle in Seattle", the corporate state intends to shift attention from the disastrous consequences of their self-serving neo-liberalism to a pre-occupation with shattered Gap windows thereby deep-sixing the badly needed discussion of the more equitable, democratic and sustainable alternatives being proffered by the anticipated G-20 protestors. |
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| − | With Pres. [[Barack Obama]] beginning to reel from his morally obscene bail-out of capitalism's upper echelon while working class people face increasing and, likely, permanent unemployment levels, coupled with his doomed to fail ever-expanding imperial wars, he cannot afford to have a united front resistance of host city residents calling him out on his pro-Wall Street giveaways and reneged campaign promises. Clearly hoping to avoid a potentially embarrassing conclusion, not unlike that which occurred when some 40,000 London demonstrators confronted the last G-20 conference in April, the White House recently finagled a PR coup by peeling away and neutralizing the local leadership of organized labor. This pre-requisite anchors a much grander strategy to set-up the time-worn good protestor/bad protestor dichotomy intended to dissuade public involvement by, first, dangling illusory carrots and, if necessary, brandishing Ahmadinejad-style sticks. |
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| − | Thankfully, for the sake of our own survival and Pittsburgh's dignity, a broad array of individuals and social movements have stepped forth to fill the vacuum left by our so-called leaders' shameful capitulation to the financial elites(Sorry, frivolous appeals to reps of Goldman-Sachs behind closed doors do not a protest make, Mr. Gerard). Rank and file workers, peace and social justice activists, feminists and environmentalists, among many others, have rallied to challenge and disrupt the profiteering mercenaries and planet-killers assembled under the G-20. This timely and righteous effort comports well with our city's legacy of autonomous and grassroots campaigns to take on the powerful and privileged. From the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike to the 1969 "Black Monday Demonstrations" to this month's LGBT civil rights ordinance victory, to name just a few, Pittsburghers have always mobilized to defend themselves, their families and communities. |
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| − | Likewise, citizens from around the city, state and, indeed, the whole country will, once again, hear the patriotic call to action and ignore the government's hollow appeal to them as consumers and rise-up to resist these global gangsters as they converge to reconfigure a new capitalist shell game to foist on the backs of poor and working people. For those of you who feel that a new world is both necessary and possible, please join us on the streets in September. |
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| − | ==Contents== |
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| − | {|cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5" width="75%" border="1" |
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| − | *[[Post-Gazette coverage of G20]] |
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| − | *[[Tribune Review coverage of G20]] |
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| − | *[[Pittsburgh media coverage of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:newscoverage|News coverage links]] |
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| − | *[[Resource sites for G20]] (web sites) |
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| − | *[[:category:who|People of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:where|Places of G20]] |
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| − | *[[Blog postings about G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:G20_Nations|Nations of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:Nations|Nations of world]] |
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| − | *[[:category:Issues|Issues of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:Planks|Planks of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:Op-Ed|Opinions of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:video|Videos of G20]] |
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| − | * [[History of G20]] |
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| − | *[[:category:events|Events of G20]] |
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| − | *[[Protests of G20]] |
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| − | *[[Parades of G20]] ''new idea!'' |
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| − | *[[Languages of G20]] |
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| − | |}[[File:G20-bridge-logo.jpg]] |
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| − | ==What's new== |
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| − | * [[Jobs and Interns with G20]] and [[G20 Volunteers]] |
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| − | * [[Twitter|Twitter Hub for G20]] |
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| − | * [[Photos of G20]] |
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| − | * [[Maps of G20]] |
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| − | * [[Cartoons of G20]] |
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| − | * [[Lessons|Lessons of the 2009 G20]] |
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| − | * [[Concept Maps|Concept Map Hub for G20]] |
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| − | * [[Money|G20 Money and Currency]] |
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| − | * [[Power|Power within G20]] |
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| − | * [[Sales|Sales, merchandise, swag, gear, souvenirs ]] |
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| − | ==Contribute to this wiki== |
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| − | To write a new article, just enter the article title in the box below. |
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| − | '''Not sure where to start?''' |
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| − | * Check out '''[[Help:Starting this wiki]]''' for some tips |
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| − | * If you are new to wikis, check '''[[Help:Getting Started]]''' |
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| − | * Check out the '''[[Project:Community Portal|community portal]]''' to see what the community is working on |
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| − | ==[[Dress up Pittsburgh|All Dressed Up]]== |
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| − | [[Image:Colorful_jackets.JPG|thumb|right|150px|Looking good in greeting gear.]] |
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| − | ''Pittsburgh needs to get in shape and dressed up to entertain and host people from around the world, regardless of style and stripes.'' Edit [[Dress up Pittsburgh]], because the world is about to knock. |
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| − | == P-G Forum Spins Replies == |
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| − | ''What's your reaction to Pittsburgh hosting a G20 economic summit? ''[[Reactions to hosting G20]] |
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| − | ==Video for Wiki insights== |
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| − | Newbies to wikis can watch this video to better understand the magic of this endeavor. |
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[[category:Newscoverage |Newscoverage category]] |
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Latest revision as of 18:59, 18 July 2011
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