G20 Gets a "D"

Leaders of the G8/G20, including President Obama, are meeting in Toronto
beginning Friday.

CLAYTON THOMAS-MULLER

DALLAS GOLDTOOTH
Currently in Toronto, Thomas-Muller is Tar Sands Campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network. He
said today: "The G20 is continuing down a road of business as usual for
big oil. The Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada is an enormous project with a
devastating impact on indigenous people, other rural people and
virtually all life in the area. It's like a massive slow-motion oil
spill." Photos of the Alberta Tar Sands are available here.

Goldtooth is at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, a gathering of
activists; he is media coordinator for the Network and is able to
connect media to other indigenous activists, including from the Gulf
affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

MELINDA ST. LOUIS

LIDY NACPIL, via Hayley
Hathaway
The Jubilee USA Network, an
alliance of 75 religious denominations and faith communities, labor,
environmental, and human rights groups and development agencies, just
issued a progress report titled "Making
the Grade? The G20's Commitment to the World's Poorest." The report
finds that G20 leaders "have made shockingly little progress since
their last summit on development commitments and calls on leaders to
take bold action to support the world's poorest at a gathering of world
leaders this week."

According to the group: "The scorecard evaluates the G20's progress
toward key commitments made at the conclusion of its first summit on the
global economic crisis in April 2009. New analysis shows that, in the
past nine months since the G20's September summit in Pittsburgh, only
$1.2 billion in additional money has been clearly accounted for and
delivered to low-income countries -- an amount equivalent to money spent
by the Canadian government for the upcoming three-day G8/G20 summits."

St. Louis is deputy director of the Jubilee USA Network. For the full
report and a news release from the group, "G2
0
Gets 'D' Grade for Breaking Commitments to the World's Poorest,"
see the group's web page: jubileeusa.org.

Nacpil, who is based in the Philippines, is with the affiliated
Jubilee South Asia/Pacific Movement
on Debt and Development. She said today: "We believe that any
process to address the global economic and financial crisis should
include the voices of all affected peoples and nations. The G20 is not
that process. However, as long as the biggest economies of the world are
meeting, they should use their time to address the flaws of the global
economic and financial system and take bold steps to transform the
system." Nacpil is currently in Detroit at the U.S. Social Forum.