Proof positive of RCMP provocateurs during the Security And Prosperity Partnership Of North America (SPP) protests in Montebello Quebec

Newly released G8/G20 summit documents reveal the RCMP and various Ontario police forces spent several months infiltrating anti-war, anti-globalization and anarchist groups with the use of undercover officers ahead of last June’s summits in Huntsville and Toronto.

The reports by the Joint Intelligence Group formed by the RCMP-led ISU (Integrated Security Unit) show that various police services contributed at least 12 undercover officers to take part in covert surveillance of potential “criminal extremists” in a bid to “detect … and disrupt” any threats.

The reports omit details on specific individuals or groups, nor do they offer conclusions about what, if any, crimes or plots of violence were detected.

“There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t in there, that’s been redacted, or isn’t spelled out. But it says these undercover operations were going on, that there were 12 officers,” says Tim Groves, who requested and obtained the reports through an access to information request. “The problem is that, looking at these documents, police expected criminal extremism everywhere.”

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Police Provocateurs stopped by union leader at anti SPP protest

Under Occupation: Toronto G20 Operation is an educational documentary that shows, in chronological order, the events that transpired over the G20 weekend in Toronto, Canada. While the mainstream media repeatedly broadcast images of burning police cars and broken windows, the cameras on the ground captured a far more terrifying story. Eyewitness video footage and firsthand accounts featured in this film tell a horrific tale of police brutality, mass arrests, secret laws and outrageous violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Press For Truth Presents Into The Fire

World leaders and activists from around the world gathered for the G20 Summit. With over 19,000 police officers and security personnel on hand, the results lead to over 1100 arrests, martial law in downtown Toronto, and the most massive violation of civil liberties in Canadian history.

Larry Buttrose - November 20, 2008

AS an exhausted world rides the downs and ups of the beast dubbed the global financial crisis, US President George W. Bush insists it does not represent the fundamental failure of the free market system.

“It would a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success,” he said before last weekend’s G20 meeting. “The crisis was not a failure of the free market system and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.”

But if the crisis has not been caused by the failure of the system, what has caused it? Bush may have suggested “unsustainable lending practices”, but they are part and parcel of the system. He may have muttered “lack of proper regulatory oversight”, but he and his neo-con fellow travellers have pooh-poohed that since they were in their ideological nappies back at Skull and Bones, the elite secret society at Yale University. In their end-of-meeting communique, the G20 leaders did nominate causes, noting “market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence … weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices … Policymakers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks.”

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Jacqueline Thorpe - November 13, 2008

The Group of 20 summit in Washington this weekend has nostalgically been dubbed Bretton Woods II in a nod to the historic 1944 gathering in New Hampshire that laid the groundwork for the postwar economic order.

While the G20 is keen on hammering out a new financial order for the 21st-century global economy, one of the key elements of the original Bretton Woods Agreement is unlikely to get more than a passing glance — currencies.

The cornerstone of Bretton Woods was a fixed exchange rate system designed to prevent the “beggar-thy-neighbour” currency devaluations that wreaked havoc on the global economy in the 1930s. The system broke down in the 1970s, and currencies have been the Achilles heel of the global economy ever since.

Today is no exception. While presidents and prime ministers get set to tinker with new global regulations and promise to pour more stimulus into a beaten-down global economy, the 10,000-pound dragon in the summit room will surely be China’s insistence on maintaining a weak currency to boost export growth, and the bulging war chest of foreign exchange reserves around the world.

China, its BRIC brothers — Brazil, Russia, India — and other emerging powers may have won a seat at the summit table but the global economy has still not figured how to absorb their growing might without major disruption.

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Stephen Foley - 12 November 2008

For the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, it is a “new Bretton Woods”, as important as the 1944 convention that established the modern financial world order. For Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to remake the global financial architecture and usher in an era of “regulated capitalism”. But beware the headlines that these leaders try to manufacture when they assemble for their credit crisis summit in Washington this weekend.

What we have is a summit without an agenda, on a crisis without an agreed cause, in a country without a functioning government. The US – whose outgoing President agreed to hold the meeting under French pressure, and whose President-elect, keen to stress that the US has “only one president at a time”, won’t even be there – has already bristled at European talk of a creating new supra-national regulators and international rules.

So little wonder everyone else is scrambling to downplay expectations for what might emerge, and to lengthen the timetable for achieving results. As one person from the UK delegation put it, “Bretton Woods took two years”.

Bretton Woods created the International Monetary Fund, which endures as the one international body powerful enough to prop up governments and economies that run into trouble. It also created a system of fixed exchange rates that failed to endure into the Seventies. Today, despite a financial crisis that is agreed to be the worst since the Great Depression, little yet under academic discussion rises to the level of ambition on display in the New Hampshire mountains in 1944. Certainly, nothing likely to be on the table on Friday and Saturday rises to that level.

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