On June 1-3, the leaders of the world’s top imperialist powers met in the heavily guarded French spa town of Evian for the G8 Summit. Now that the US invasion of Iraq is an accomplished fact, leaders who had been hailed as opponents of the war, such as France’s right-wing President Chirac, used handsome-sounding phrases about “cooperation” and “reconstruction” to paper over previous disputes. The leaders agreed to continue with neo-liberal “structural reforms” and “flexibility” – language which Reuters candidly describes as “code for unpopular overhauls of pensions, welfare, and job protections.”
Angered by the capitalist policies of the G8 leaders, approximately 100,000 people descended upon the Swiss city of Geneva and defied a protest ban to demonstrate against environmental destruction, massive poverty in the neo-colonial world, and the recent US war. The protests show that despite all the propaganda about the “liberation of Iraq,” millions of people around the world are well-aware that the rule of global capital is anything but peaceful or democratic, and that the US military occupation of Iraq merely amounts to low-intensity war.