Communist Web Saturday 27th May 2000 9.30pm gmt Stand up for global justice!:Shut down the World Economic Forum! In September the World Economic Forum will hold the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit, "Asia/Pacific in the 21st Century: Leveraging the new drivers of growth". The summit is jointly sponsored by the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Davos Connection (the Australian arm of the World Economic Forum) and will take place at the Crown Casino, Melbourne, over September 11-13. Participants are being lured to the summit with the opportunity to "meet key leaders from business, politics and academia at a time when the eyes of the world will be fixed on Australia, and they may coordinate their participation in the Summit with the Olympic Games." The World Economic Forum is an organisation made up of the richest global companies. For the past 30 years it has held regular summits and meetings aimed at "managing globalisation". Every February in the Swiss mountain resort town of Davos, over a thousand of the world's CEOs meet along with a restricted list of politicians, academics and influential media who are invited along. Discussions range from how to manage the Asian economic crisis to the internet revolution, all with the aim of extending market and corporate power. Like the World Trade Organisation, the Forum is a means of promoting global policies aimed at weakening labour, removing environmental protection and intensifying the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. At Seattle last year, at Davos in February this year and recently in Washington, coalitions of trade unions, environmentalists and human rights activists protested against the global aims of the rich and powerful. In September this year such protests will continue. The S11 Alliance is a coalition of unionists, environmentalists, students, human rights activists and community campaigners. Join them in organising the mass rally for global justice and the environment this September. This is an important call to action! The Olympic year offers an opportunity to draw the media's attention to the real purposes of the World Economic Forum while the whole world is watching Australia. We are... http://www.billkath.demon.co.uk/cw/standup/standup.html
