Alison Dellit
On August 30, the fifth annual Forbes Global CEO Conference will be opened with a cocktail party at the Opera House. As well as hosts PM John Howard and Steve Forbes, this collection of the world's wealthiest scumbags will be greeted by thousands of protesters, putting forward a different vision of how the world could be.
The Forbes meeting does not have the official profile of meetings of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but it is one of the international gatherings designed to further imperialist hegemony.
The world's richest man, Steve Forbes is the editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, which was founded by his grandfather. The magazine is perhaps most well known for its lists of the powerful and wealthy — the Forbes 400 is a list of the wealthiest people in the US and the Forbes 500 is a list of the biggest US corporations. This gathering draws together 300 of the world's top CEOs, providing a networking and caucusing event for the business elite.
There are hundreds of reasons to protest this meeting. One is to oppose the war on Iraq. Steve Forbes is not only the world's richest man, he is a founding member of the Project for a New American Century, the neo-conservative think-tank that pulls together the gang in Washington that includes Vice-President Dick Cheney that led the push for the US invasion of Iraq.
Another reason is to defend workers' rights. Many of the visiting CEOs, including Forbes, have fought to introduce anti-worker laws, and will no doubt be offering their support to Howard's current attack of workers' rights.
For example, Forbes editor William Baldwin describes himself as a "job killer", and claims that job creation costs society more than it benefits it. Another guest, Mohamed Alabbar, the director general of the Dubai government's Department of Economic Development and the chairman of Emaar Properties. Alabbar said last year that Dubai's oil wealth could be "a barrier to prosperity" because it had led to "unrealistic salary expectations among the new generation of Arab job seekers".
It is not surprising then that several unions have agreed to endorse the August 30 protest against the Forbes meeting. So far, the NSW branch of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the NSW Teachers Federation and the NSW Fire Brigade Employees Union have sponsored the protests, which are also being supported by Unions NSW.
The protests, which will begin around 5pm on August 30 at Circular Quay, will bring together unionists, anti-war campaigners, gay and lesbian activists (Howard and Forbes are well-known homophobes), women's rights activists (Forbes has led the anti-abortion push in the US), anti-racist activists and all those who oppose the exploitation of the world for the profits of a few. Are you going to be one of them?
[For more information visit <http://www.30a.org> or phone 0419 253 342 or 0438 800 244. Protest meetings are held every Tuesday at 6.30pm in Sydney's Gaelic Club.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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