G20

[rodgerdodger]

What are they protesting about?

[Q.]

Polyester suit Nazis that rule the world.

[Psyber]

Polyester suit Nazis that rule the world.

So they should protest!
Anybody who would wear a Polyester suit is unfit to rule the world!

[Gozu]

I thought it was interesting to hear what Guy Rundle pointed out and at that last big one a few years ago, the bankers were leaning out their windows and pouring champagne on the protesters and throwing photocopied $50 notes at them and then finally realised they couldn't get out of their building!

[rodgerdodger]

Can someone please give me a decent explanation for the protests? I'm as left as the next bloke but these Gwhatever number summits just seem like the world cup of protesting for no purpose at all.

[heater31]

Can someone please give me a decent explanation for the protests? I'm as left as the next bloke but these Gwhatever number summits just seem like the world cup of protesting for no purpose at all.

the easy explanation is Globalisation I think, which on another note We wouldn't be in this current financial mess too.

[cennals05]

The protests were no where near as big as they predicted. We had a whole contingency plan in place at work because of the G20. We had to wear casuals to work so we weren't mistaken for bankers and if people could work from home they had to. I work right next to one of the RBS offices and there was some concern that after they smashed in the one about 10 minutes up the road they were going to march down to the one next to us but nothing eventuated.

[Sojourner]

What are they protesting about?

Its meant to be a protest against extreme capatalism and the effects of it.

[Psyber]

Here's another view:

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine ... l-it.thtml

Here are a couple of excerpts:

In spite of the spartan surroundings, the G20 will run up a reported bill of £50 million. A bill of £5 million alone will go to the company organising the staging and sound equipment. The enormous security bill will, in a typical piece of Brownomics, appear off-balance sheet — the police have not been granted a specific budget, so resources will have to be switched from other areas. You can be sure that there won’t be time for much other policing in London on 2 April.

Since the G20 doesn’t have a hope of getting through its ambitious agenda in a day, might it drop an item or two? There is one thing begging to be left off until another time, yet for some reason I have a suspicion it is the item about which Gordon Brown cares most. It is the subject of tax havens. Brown — and this is one subject on which he does find common ground with Angela Merkel — wants to close them down. He wants their banks to be forced to reveal information on their depositors. Fair enough, where the aim is to trace criminal activity. But why try to stitch up the rules at what is supposed to be a crisis meeting for the global economy and to which the tax haven nations have not even been invited? There are no prizes for guessing why: Brown knows full well that the dire state of the public finances will require taxes to be raised sharply after the election — way beyond the new 45 per cent upper rate of income tax which has already been announced — and that it will create a flight of wealthy citizens to tax havens.

PS: It mentions there are actually 22 countries represented...