G8, THE GAME IS OVER

By Hazel Henderson Reprint | | Print |

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NEW YORK, Jul 10 2009 (IPS) - A powerful new global player has emerged on the world stage: the Group of 192. The G7, the G8 and the G20 must now move over.

While the G8, which met in L’Aquila, Italy, July 8-10, boasts that its members account for over 65 percent of the Gross World Product, it comprises only a handful of countries and a mere 14 percent of the global population.

The G192, on the other hand, represents for the first time all of the world’s national economies, from North to South and East to West. Long dismissed by financial elites in the now discredited, shrinking global casino, the G192 met in New York at the United Nations General Assembly June 24-26.

They shared their long-ignored views on the financial crisis and its Impacts on Development. President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann’s masterful opening speech laid out an expanded view of the whole human family and our evolution on planet earth which allowed for a deeper dialogue among this G192 than has ever been seen at G7 and G8 summits.

The delegates were able to give voice to the new paradigm emerging from the collapse of Wall Street and the global casino that its market fundamentalist ideologies spawned. This new paradigm downsized finance and put its players back in their real place as intermediaries and servants, not masters of the real productive sectors of their economies. An efficient financial sector should comprise less than 10 percent of a country’s Gross Domestic Product. These new leaders reframed their economies as sub-sets of their societies and cultures, with their multiple sources of wisdom, values, and wealth beyond money, and with their ecological, social, and cultural assets interacting with the creative energies of their people -human capital.

The President’s Commission of Experts, chaired by Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz, reported its many sensible recommendations: democratising the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation, a new global reserve currency as an alternative to the volatile US dollar, and stricter regulations over all areas of financial markets, rating agencies, derivatives, and excessive risk-taking.

The experts also called for a very small tax on financial transactions to reduce volatility and provide revenues for financing the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 and the Millennium Development Goals: poverty reduction, education, healthcare and the further empowerment of women. The G192 adopted the Experts’ report.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media largely ignored this historic event, and the heads of state of the G192’s largest players, the US and other G20 member countries, sent lower-ranking officials to the meeting. The G192’s vision spells the end of their domination of global policies and that of their incumbent fossil-fuelled industrial sectors.

Watch for the G192’s 21st century style of distributed network power -unlike the fossilised elites at their highly-restricted and choreographed G8 and G20 summits. At last the G192 has a world platform to air their frustrations with Anglo-Saxon, neoliberal market fundamentalism and how this ideology spread from the University of Chicago through US president Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom prime minister Margaret Thatcher to the harsh ‘conditionalities’ and double standards of the IMF and the misplaced priorities of the World Bank. The imposition of these policies is now recognised as unjust and harmful, exacerbating the meltdowns of Asian economies. Countries like China and Malaysia avoided this pain by using their own homegrown policies.

The G192 has envisioned a new world game. They see finance serving people and a healthier, sustainable, and just future for all. They see huge opportunities in the collapse of the global casino and in the climate crisis to change course and invest in building cleaner, greener economies worldwide. They are now supported by 21 agencies of the United Nations, spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Labour Organisation in their launching in 2008 of the Green Economy Initiative and a Green New Deal for the world.

The G192 also provided a forum for civil society organisations whose policies have developed since 2000 at their World Social Forum and by thousands of grassroots groups that helped shaped the new vision. All are now coalescing to turn the lugubrious debate about the costs to incumbent fossil fuel sectors of mitigating climate change to the positive calculations of the massive savings and new wealth and millions of new jobs that will be created by investing in Climate Prosperity Bonds.

The world is ready for this new vision and welcomes the emergence of all the new leaders of the G192. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Hazel Henderson is author of Beyond Globalization, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy and other books. She co-created with the Calvert Henderson Quality of Life Indicators www.calvert-Henderson.com