Pittsburgh - As media and government delegates prepare for the G20 Summit to be held Sep. 24-25 in Pittsburgh, local business and activist groups are promoting clashing visions of days to come.

    Hit hard over the last quarter of the twentieth century with a collapsing steel industry, recession and falling population, Pittsburgh is still a decent place to live - often highly rated because of low housing costs.

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World Bank, NGOs Exhort G20 Not to Forget the Poorest    •

    On one side, Pittsburgh government and business leaders say they have reshaped the city to connect with globalisation as a hi-tech, financial and medical industry hub.

    On the other side, labour, community, youth and environmental groups are fighting for green jobs and clean energy, while calling into question how government and corporate leaders have dealt with the global financial crisis and urban renewal.

    The host of the summit is the Pittsburgh G20 Partnership, run out of the Allegheny County Conference on Community Development, which according to its executive vice president is "a sort of holding company" for the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and other regional business groups.

    The group includes many of the largest business interests active in the area. Public affairs coordinator, Philip Cynar, explains, "Our group is made up of corporations involved in advanced manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, information technology, and energy".

    Bill Flanagan, executive vice president of corporate relations for the group, says that Pittsburgh's business leaders have learned to operate in a globalised world, and the G20 summit provides a prime opportunity for further insertion into the global market.

    "We've learned capital tends to flow freely" so "we are trying to put Pittsburgh on the map and attract global investors," he told IPS.

    Large business interests have been at the centre of coordinating the summit. "We communicate on a daily basis with the White House, the State Department and the Secret Service, all in preparation for communication operations and planning receptions at the 14 hotels where journalists and delegates will be staying, the trappings for welcoming the world to the region," Flanagan added.

    Not far from the Regional Enterprise Tower, where business groups promoting the summit operate, a peace and justice coalition based out of Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Centre is organising for a people's march against the G20, sending a very different message.

    The umbrella coalition, including organised labour, anti-war activists, and numerous environmentalist, socialist, and grassroots organisations, levels steep criticism at the G20 leaders and global capitalism, most pointedly the effects on low-income and working-class people by state policies meant to benefit transnational corporations.

    Melissa Minnich, communications director of the Thomas Merton Centre, says, "The financial bailouts of the G20 governments are meant to benefit the largest corporations. The people that end up paying are the average citizens."

    Dozens of other organisations are taking part, such as the G-6 Billion with an inter-faith march, a march for jobs in Pittsburgh's poor Hill district, and a people's summit to call for economic and environmental justice.

    Carl Davidson, a labour writer and organiser with the local Beaver County Peace Links, observes that, "Pittsburgh in particular has suffered from policies advocated by the G20, hit hard by the job loss and deindustrialisation in globalisation. People see these world leaders and the global corporations they work with as responsible."

    David Hoskins, an organiser with Bail Out the People, told IPS "We will have a march for jobs, calling for a federal job programme like the New Deal era, on Pittsburgh's Hill".

    Pittsburgh business and government leaders, with a successful downtown, have recast the city as a modern centre for green-technology innovation.

    But problems remain. Pennsylvania is the only state in the U.S. without a budget. Unable to pay some of its pensioners, the city of Pittsburgh has sold off parking lots to raise money.

    With ghost towns at the city's outskirts and many communities suffering from environmental degradation, local activists say development has been an undemocratic process geared toward the beautiful downtown.

    Melissa Minnich says poor communities have lost out. She lives near "one green space that was slated to be worked on". However, she explains, "We were told by the contractors that city funds were rerouted to downtown so construction could not begin."

    With rich coal deposits in the south of Pittsburgh, dirty mining techniques remain. Longwall mining, cutting deep horizontal shafts, has caused sinkholes, draining one lake on the outskirts of the city, as well as forming huge coal piles that sit idle leaking mercury into the Monogahela River.

    There are dozens of large coal-fired electric power generators, and one nuclear power plant, all along the Ohio River stretching down to West Virginia, supplying electricity to much of the east coast.

    David Meieran, an organiser with the Three Rivers Climate Convergence, a Pittsburgh-based environmental group, says "It is absurd that Pittsburgh's chamber of commerce and corporations like the PNC-bank are saying they are green companies now just because they are constructing these environmentally-friendly buildings."

    He adds, "They still maintain sizable holdings in coal companies that do mountaintop removal and longwall mining, profiting off deaths and environmental devastation."

    In 2008, according to the American Lung Association, Pittsburgh ranked above all other U.S. cities in short-term levels of particle pollution, "a deadly cocktail of ash, soot, diesel exhaust, chemicals, metals and aerosols that can spike dangerously for hours to weeks on end".

    The defence industry has a presence in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon University has a robotics institute working closely with the U.S. Department of Defence. Local universities are involved in healthcare research and development tied to the private sector.

    To defend the summit, Pittsburgh's mayor and city council have amassed a force of four thousand police, including many auxiliaries from the rural countryside. Two thousand National Guard and an untold number of secret service agents with hi-tech surveillance will be present.

    Diane Richard, public information officer for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, explains "There are facilities in place to afford us leeway in how many arrests we have to make". She acknowledged other agencies would have horseback units present.

    Much of the discussion within Pittsburgh's advertiser-radio and newspapers has focused on financial costs of hosting the summit and the inconvenience to downtown dwellers.

    One downtown resident told IPS that a big part of the population in the city "is as old and conservative as Miami, Florida, and they don't want to see any spray paint or flag burning". He expects that the Pittsburgh police will use harsh tactics against protesters.

    It is believed tens of thousands of protesters from Pittsburgh and around the country will gather. A mass march will start on Sep. 25, at 12:00 P.M., on the corner of 5th and Craft near Pittsburgh's college.

    Reverend Thomas E. Smith, of the local Monumental Church, has offered his lawn and parking lots to protestors.

    He explains, "We are hosting a tent city that is symbolic of the need for a fair and living wage, and for a national and international workers' movement similar to the poor peoples' campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King was in the process of organising prior to being assassinated."

    The G20 protesters face hurdles in getting their message out to a wider audience. With official politics in the United States channeled through a corporate media and a powerful two-party monopoly, peace and justice organisers say, the biggest challenge is just for their message to be heard.

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World Bank, NGOs Exhort G20 Not to Forget the Poorest

Wednesday 16 September 2009

by: Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton, Inter Press Service  |  Visit article original @ Inter Press Service

    Washington - The World Bank and major non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are calling on leaders who will gather for next week's Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh not to forget the needs of the world's poorest countries, which have been severely affected by the last year's financial crisis.

    In a report released here Wednesday, the Bank said the global recession, whose repercussions are still being felt around the world, will have resulted in an additional 89 million people living in absolute poverty, or on less than 1.25 dollars a day, by the end of next year.

    "The reality is that as the world is showing signs of recovery, at least in affluent countries, low income countries simply do not have the fiscal space to implement countercyclical policies," said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international NGOs.

    Moreover, nearly 12 billion dollars in critical spending on basic needs and infrastructure of the world's poorest people have been put at risk by the crisis, according to the 24-page report prepared by the Bank for the G20 meeting, which takes place Sep 24-25.

    "The poor and most vulnerable are at greatest risk from economic shocks – families are pushed into poverty, health conditions deteriorate, school attendance declines, and progress in other critical areas is stalled or reversed," said Bank President Robert Zoellick.

    "The poorest countries may not be well represented on the G20, but we cannot ignore the long-term costs of the global downturn on their people's health and education," he added.

    A number of western-based NGO heads added their voice to Zoellick's, stressing that the G20, which includes the world's richest nations, as well as powerful emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India, and Indonesia, must meet the pledge leaders made at the London Summit last April to provide 50 billion dollars to low-income countries (LICs) to help them cope with the effects of the crisis.

    Development NGOs have insisted that new G20 aid to developing countries must be added to existing financing.

    "It is crucial that this is additive and not deducted from current aid budgets," said Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser during a teleconference Wednesday.

    When the G20 leaders get together next week, they are expected to tackle an ambitious agenda headed by reform of financial markets and the global financial system; renewed efforts to conclude the stalled Doha Round of trade negotiations by next year; countering growing protectionist pressures in some of the world's biggest economies; and gaining wider consensus on measures to address global warming in advance of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

    The two-day summit, which will be hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama, is also likely to be taken up with intense discussions among various groups of leaders about simmering foreign policy issues, including efforts to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict, the growing intensity of the war in Afghanistan, and how to deal with nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea.

    With such a heavy agenda packed into such a tight schedule, the Bank and the NGOs are concerned that pressing concerns of the world's 43 poorest countries, most of which are situated in sub-Saharan Africa, may not get the attention they need. South Africa is the G20's only member from the region.

    The new Bank report notes that the financial crisis, which exploded with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment house exactly one year ago this week, has been the last in a series of three external shocks over which most poor countries, whose economic performance had improved dramatically over the previous decade, had little or no control.

    Soaring food and fuel prices had already pushed 130 million to 155 million people in developing countries into absolute poverty by the end of 2008, according to the Bank.

    "One of the reasons food security is so important is that food prices which went up in 2007 and 2008 have not come back down. People in developing countries are paying 30 percent more for food (than before prices dramatically shot up)," said Ritu Sharma, president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a U.S.-based NGO that advocates for economic policies to help women out of poverty.

    "For many people in developing countries this means they are eating less than they were before," she added.

    The financial crisis, which resulted in negative growth in the world's richest countries, sharply reduced demand for minerals, other commodity exports, and apparel-assembly industries on which many of the world's poorest countries depend.

    In Zambia, for example, the decline in copper prices led to the unemployment of one quarter of the country's miners.

    Recessions in wealthy countries also reduced the amount of remittances that immigrants were sending home to their families. Tourism has also been hard hit.

    By the time of the London Summit, the Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were warning that poor countries faced a "development emergency" that would put at least some of the U.N.'s key poverty-reducing 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) out of reach for many countries, especially in Africa and South Asia.

    To cope with the crisis, the G20 agreed to provide 750 billion dollars to the IMF, most of which, however, was directed at middle-income countries. At the same time, it supported an increase in lending by the major multilateral development banks (MDBs), including the World Bank, of 100 billion dollars a year over three years and endorsed the Bank's plans to sharply increase lending for infrastructure projects, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and maintaining social safety nets.

    In spite of these moves, however, the new report says that the poorest countries still face serious financing shortfalls in all of these areas, amounting to a total of about 11.6 billion dollars.

    "Unless these shortfalls are covered, achievements to date in reducing poverty and establishing the foundations for longer-term development will be eroded," the report concluded.

    "Even more will be needed if additional progress is to be made in reaching the MDGs," it said, which include such objectives as achieving universal primary education, and sharply reducing the incidence of infant and maternal mortality by 2015.

    In particular, the Bank report calls for the G20 to take coordinated action on several fronts. The group should endorse and reinforce the 20-billion-dollar pledge made by the Group of Eight (G-8) Summit in L'Aquila, Italy to enhance agricultural development in the poorest countries and scale up efforts to expand financing for SMEs as the most effective means for increasing employment.

    "President Obama made big commitment to food security and agriculture at the G8," said Sharma. "We want to make sure that these new investments in agro are really reaching the poorest of the poor. We don't want to see these large commitments going to large-scale agribusiness that turns small farmers into migrant workers."

    The report also calls for the creation of a permanent global "Crisis Response Facility" (CRF) with the authority to provide quick aid to low-income countries that suffer severe shocks such as the food, fuel and financial crises, and which are not of their own making.

    "At present there is a gap in the global aid architecture in the provision of timely and flexible support following crises," the report noted, adding that the Bank intends to consult with donors and other key participants in its soft-loan facility, the International Development Association (IDA), about establishing such a fund as soon as possible.

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