John Cox, who is spending a year in Germany doing research for his Ph.D. in history, told UNC students in a speech Tuesday night that policies formed by the G-8 help industrialized countries grow richer at the expense of Third World nations.
"The G-8 is a meeting of the seven leading industrialized nations," Cox said. "There's been a growing movement against these organizations who operate on behalf of the capitalist powers."
Leaders of these nations, such as President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, insist that policies such as free trade benefit the entire world. But Cox said that when 40 percent of Africans are malnourished and 3.5 billion people around the world survive on less than $2 a day, something is wrong.
"Bush probably doesn't read a whole lot of books or anything, but I think he used to play baseball, so he should have a grasp of statistics," Cox said.
He said programs such as the reduction of social spending allowances, elimination of regulations on foreign corporations and increased interest rates lead to higher educational and medical fees, sweatshops and unemployment of small business owners, respectively.
"Impoverishment and misery has increased as a result of the policies of the G-8, World Bank and (International Monetary Fund)," Cox said.
The movement began with a demonstration at a 1999 IMF meeting in Seattle, Cox said. The protesters were successful in shutting down the meeting, leading Blair to call them a "traveling anarchist circus."
Smaller protests have occurred across the globe in the two years since Seattle, but none have been on the scale of the Genoa protest, Cox said.
"(Genoa) was a very positive, very spirited demonstration which will hopefully help the movement," Cox said. He said that although most protesters arrived planning to abstain from violence, helicopters dropped tear gas on them, and members of the Italian media were arrested and beaten while encamped in tents after the protest ended.
