The integrated security forces asked to face the demonstrators and the supposed terrorists amongst them in order to safeguard public and private downtown property and the visiting G8/G20 no(ta)bles and their companions, numbered 19,000 to 20,000.

If we accept the high crowd count, there was one heavily, indeed, ludicrously heavily, armed “peace” officer for every unarmed demonstrator.

If we accept the low crowd count (as the police would like us to do), there were two riot-geared, baton/shield/rubber bullet/tear gas/gun equipped guardians of the “peace” for every unarmed demonstrator.

Do our elites and police feel that insecure? How cowardly are they? How bad is their conscience that they manifest such fear about the time-honoured mass expression of opinions by the citizens they govern and purportedly serve? Or, is it simply that they want to intimidate the citizens in order to render them socially and politically catatonic?

The Force– Its Apparent Clumsy Impotence

But, wait, maybe this is kind of numerical critique is unfair; maybe, given the sheer malevolence manifested by the protestors, the police needed to have had an even larger force. After all, as it turned out, huge as it was, the integrated security force seemingly proved to be impotent when confronted by tricky mischief-makers.

This enormous paramilitary presence did not (was unable to?) stop 50, 100 or 200 (the guesstimates depend on who is guessing for what reason) easily spotted ‘troublemakers’ to ‘escape’ from the militarily contained designated marching route. As if to help the security forces, these ‘troublemakers’ had called attention to themselves. They were clad in what was known to the police to be their ‘trade mark’: black clothes and bandanas they wore to identify themselves as a militant group. The police readily acknowledge, indeed emphasize (in order to show the extent of their commitment to be vigilant guardians of the safety of property and the world leaders), that they long had had this group under surveillance and had expected it to foment trouble. CSIS had gathered information for 18 months prior to the G8/G20 events. The police tell us that they were ready for the groups that went by the media-seducing name of the Black Bloc.
Somehow, something went wrong.

RCMP Chief Superintendent, McNeil, from Nova Scotia, in charge of the command centre was quoted in the Cape Breton Post: “We have the ability through our video feed to see everything that is going on…helicopters and planes [are] providing video feed…We can see them from the air, we can see them from the ground, if there is anyone trying to interfere, we would see that.”

This scouted and watched group’s members had no difficulty in scampering away from the gaze of the multitude of installed and mobile police cameras and no problem in evading the scrutiny of trained policing and security experts. More, their intel (to use the policese for the product of police snooping) led them directly to abandoned police cruisers. Their ‘escape’ and tactics were so perfect that they had enough time to set the lonely police vehicles alight. There was time, too, to have the blazing automobiles photographed before any of the camera- and sound-connected police officers could reach these conflagrations. Then, there was also all that wanton smashing of store front windows, with the help of pick axes that had been undetected by the watching paramilitary troops, senseless acts of violence against innocent property, the very thing our guardians are charged with protecting at all costs. The information- and technologically-armed integrated police force was nowhere to be seen. Somehow, these guardians of all that is worth preserving, could neither stop this burning and smashing, nor, it appears, catch many of the wrongdoers.

The Force—Its Hidden Cunning

The Saturday march had a pre-arranged route and the march’s organizers had appointed monitors who helped the police keep the demonstrators within the agreed metes and bounds. The huge number of police officers looked to be rooted to the spots they had been assigned along the route and manifestly were focused on their containment role. It was a bit of an inflexible line, somewhat reminiscent of the famously ineffective Maginot Line erected by the French who thought it was impassable only to find that their enemy had simply walked around it. This organized stillness is a plausible explanation for the integrated security force’s failure to prevent the Black Bloc assault. Plausible, not convincing, explanation.

The security planners deployed to safeguard these meetings did a lot of preparatory work. They knew (as they have told us) that the Black Bloc would be at the march and other demonstrations during the G8/G20 events. It has been reported (with some pride) that CSIS had gathered information for 18 months prior to the G8/G20 events. More, the recent history of similar events told them what the Black Bloc’s likely tactics would be. The paramilitary forces that were asked to protect us had ample time to plan responses.

It is difficult to believe that The Force was caught off guard.

Indeed, there is some evidence that it was not. Pro-police and anti-demonstrator commentators have bemoaned the fact that some police officers at the march saw the trouble develop and would have liked to stop it in its tracks.

Per Joe Warmington, The Sun, 29 June, 2010, p.7: “I also wonder if Blair owes an apology to his frustrated police officers, who showed incredible restraint, professionalism and calm during the rampage on Saturday while a small group of thugs took over the city and set police cars ablaze while smashing and looting everything in their way. A number of officers have told me they were keen to take the dirt balls down and end it early… [as some said]: ‘our guys wanted to wade in but our senior officers and our socialist mayor would not permit it.’ “

The integrated security force was not caught so much off guard as it failed to react to what it knew was happening.

To repeat, for the sake of fairness, it could be the case that, despite all the forewarnings and knowledge, the mustering of such a large force led to rigidity: it was simply not supple enough to react quickly because it was organized around standing still, monitoring a slow-moving, unthreatening mass of demonstrators. But, this is not very convincing, certainly not if we are to give the police forces the respect they claim is owed to them as members of an effective professional force. The plot thins.

The senior ranks of the force, unbeknown to the mass of their officers, may have seen an advantage in permitting the breakaways to achieve some success.

This line of thinking suggests that The Force had a stake in permitting, even facilitating, “violence” and “unlawfulness”. An orderly march, as pre-arranged, did not serve its more insidious purposes. This notion coincides with some conspiracy theories doing the rounds.

There are many who suggest that the so-called Black Bloc membership had been infiltrated by the security forces to ensure that the militants would be militant. This camp relies on some widely-circulating, revealing, but not-as-yet completely, conclusive, You Tube videos. This evidence is given further weight by the experience at Montebello where security forces used those very tactics to invoke the pressing need and their right to use overwhelming force against protesting crowds. And students of history of dissent know that infiltration of dissident groups and the use of agents provocateurs, have been weapons of choice of intelligence and security forces. Why not here?

Of course, the militants, the Black Bloc and their allies, will want to argue that they acted on their own and, for their part, the integrated security forces will want to deny that they acted as provocateurs, although, in the end, they will be happy to say that they infiltrated a group that presented a clear and present danger to public safety. For the moment, it should suffice to note that

(i) this understanding of what may have happened provides a convincing, rather than plausible, explanation for this highly orchestrated mass paramilitary’s abject failure to respond adequately to a few miscreants, and that

(ii) the paramilitary’s non-response to the so-called Black Bloc attacks bestowed distinct benefits on it and the elites it protects.

First, the Harper government, and to a lesser extent, the Ontario and Toronto municipal governments, were now in a better position to justify the much-criticized public expenditure on security for these events. Second, the Ontario government was provided with much-needed ammunition to defend its Police State tactics when it bestowed ( and then misrepresented), in as stealthy a manner as it could devise, regulations that gave the paramilitary forces the equivalent of martial law (an expression used by The Sun in an editorial!) powers. Third, the almost obscene size of the integrated security forces could be more easily justified by the police. Fourth, the security forces could, and did, claim that their operations had been a success. True, clever and devious wrongdoers had done some damage to property, revealing their indifference to basic Canadian values, but their real goal, the disruption of the sacrosanct perimeter within which the G8/G20 were deliberating on how best to serve the welfare of the people, had been thwarted. The perimeter was not breached. The Force had served and protected. Fifth, many of the peaceful protestors now might be persuaded that these kinds of demonstrations, which were repeatedly acknowledged to be inherently precious by the police and the politicians because they, too, support manifestations of free thinking and speaking in a free society, are counterproductive as a means to persuade others to join their causes. Even with the protection of a massive police force, their liberal democratic exercise of freedom was abused by radicals with little interest in freedom of speech. This had perverted, and would always pervert, an exercise to raise the wider public’s consciousness about controversial political issues, in this case, the doings of the G8/G20. Their freedoms had been curtailed , not by the oppressive powers of the State, but by thugs.

The so-called rampages of the Black Bloc were identified as criminal acts carried out by anarchists, language instantly adopted by the mainstream media. The term ‘anarchist’ was used not in its technical political science sense to describe a legitimate perspective on how a people should govern itself, but as a term that hinted darkly at a derided movement of a long ago past when crude bomb-throwing anarchists were featured in cartoons as bestial morons and villains closely associated with reds and other reprehensible menaces to civilization. Thus police spokepersons and public relations shills could earnestly express their sympathy for legitimate debate and protest while justifying the police’s use of massive repressive force to safeguard those very values.

The framework in which the G8/G20 protests were viewed had been changed dramatically.

Once the demonstration had effectively been demonized and criminalized, the hitherto somnolent (if visually threatening) security forces swung into action. No longer languid or impassive, the integrated security forces became The Force they had always been. They pursued people taunting them by singing the national anthem as they stood in front of the line barring their free movement; they kettled non-Black Bloc users of the streets, a tactic that used their overwhelming numbers to herd people into tiny pens as if they were beasts to be branded and, then, detained people without legitimate reason. All this became the order of the day, caught on cameras held by journalists and electronically equipped people out on the streets. The justifications needed for all these brute uses of power sprang naturally from the false characterization of the situation as criminal, rather than political:

The situation had got out of hand and spontaneous decisions had to be made and it was wise to err on the side of caution. Confronted by extreme lawlessness and threats to the security of the very people to be protected, it was acceptable to detain anyone whose very presence at a scene suggested that s/he might be complicit in illicit activities, might be protecting lawless wrongdoers and agents of violence.

The police, with first access to the media, told and sold this story. The narrative was that, yes, some mistakes had been made, but that, on the whole, the police had acted with impeccable patience, professionalism and respect for the right of decent people to assemble and speak. Indeed, those decent folk had been protected by the security forces’ use of power.

The Force—A Natural Target but not The Target

The reaction to the frightening use of violent power by the police, righteously defended by mainstream media, Toronto City Council and glib leaders of the paramilitary forces, has been inevitable. It has led to outrage by civil libertarians who want to contest the unlawful search and seizures, the unlawful detentions, the conditions of detention, the physical assaults by some police officers, and the like. Cries for an independent inquiry into police overreach are gathering, what I suspect will be, an unstoppable momentum. All of the agitation for accountability, for the imposition of just deserts, is commendable. Some measure of public accounting is warranted. And, given the large number of tales by hard-to-dismiss stories of brutality suffered by independent journalists, added to the countless police excesses to be seen on You Tube videos flashing around the world, evidence gathered by impeccable human rights’ groups such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International, it is likely that there will be some form of independent investigation. Indeed, the Toronto Police Services Board has already offered the idea of a very limited independent investigation, one without subpoena powers. Probably, something more credible will be extracted if agitation about the police force behaviour persists.

All of this is agitation for accountability, for the imposition of just deserts, is commendable. It should be supported. I support it. But misuse of police powers, inefficient policing and abuse of legislative authority might become the politics that are spawned by the G8/G20 events. While this risk is understood by many who call for police accountability, the battle to make some progress on this front is so difficult that the pre-occupation may come to marginalize a larger and important politics. That would be a pity. That would be a victory for The Force and its political masters, local and foreign.

The mainstream media and local politicians are eager to show their support for the police and, while readily acknowledging that there may have been some excesses, they furnish the police with a bully pulpit for the making of their central argument by making the argument for them: they did their best in a tough situation made tenser than it might have been by the outrageous behaviour of a few hooligans, many of which came from other places just to make mischief in Toronto.

In this kind of context, it may be difficult to achieve more than make some reformist gains. There are likely to be findings that not enough oversight was provided, that new polices for such mass deployment of police forces should be developed, that better and clearer lines of authority and more supple co-ordination should be built into policing practices, that some new complaints’ mechanisms should be set-up, that some of the more brutish officers should be punished, that some apologies should be offered…

We have been down these paths before. After all, this was hardly the first time that modern police forces have been accused of exaggerating dangers, of using too much power to quell minor wrongs, of using hysterically created panics to institute sweeps against profiled groups. The Bath House raids revealed, in stark terms, the homophobic nature of the police. Stopping young black men in the street was (and is) understood to be another clear and frequent abuse of civil rights by a police force that reflects and drives racism. The Yonge Street riots followed yet another shooting of a black man in Toronto. The day after the riots the police went on a rampage of their own as they rounded up people wholesale, mostly black. The context of all this was a high rate (by North American standards, not just Canadian ones) of police shootings of suspects, disproportionately black. The evidence of this was so overwhelming that it led to a Commission of Inquiry into Systemic Racism in the Ontario Justice System which, in turn made a series of recommendations that led to the formation of a new oversight body, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). The SIU is currently being criticized for its alleged inaction as people of colour appear to be favourite targets, as suggested by the Toronto Star’s investigative reports into alleged racism in the police forces. More apposite to the G8/G20 events, there were outcries that led to the McDonald Commission when it was discovered that the RCMP had shamelessly, illegally conducted the unauthorized surveillance of hundreds and thousands of citizens, invading their privacy, violating their civil liberties. This led to a restructuring of the so-called national security forces which, currently are under the microscope for, once again, breaching citizens’ rights in a wholesale manner. This time, the profiled targets are people from Pakistan and the Middle East who are Muslim. The associated participation in illegal renditions will undoubtedly lead to some new oversight mechanism and new structures. Native peoples have been the subject of police repression and oppression for ever and a day. Most recently, stories about police disinterest in killed aboriginal women, taking and leaving aboriginal men helpless in isolated areas to freeze, have filled our newspapers. Earlier, the massive forces assembled to tackle indigenous people reclaiming their land at Stoney Creek and the killing of the unarmed Dudley George, followed by an endless numbers of inquiries and legal processes during which politicians and the police set up screens of plausible denial and engaged in the shifty shifting of responsibility, does not seem to have been a signal for the reduction of the use of force whenever similar claims were and are made—Oka, Caledonia, Clayoquot Sound… The abusive uses of Tasers to subdue relatively harmless individuals is another recent manifestation of power abused, leading to soul searching, the imposition of new practices and, inevitably, soon to a renewed outburst of abuses.

Whatever repellant notions exist in our society, they are not only reflected in spades in the policing and security forces, they are given life and sway by these forces in a way that no other institution has the legitimacy to do. It is very important to recognize this and to recognize that, despite many reformist efforts, we have not made many in-roads in our efforts to educate the police forces into civility or in our attempts to constrain police powers. The gross abuses of power during the Toronto G20 events are a stark reminder both of the need to gain control over these forces and of the very high hurdles civil libertarians have to clear.

Coercively used powers, without proper cause or authority, are routine features of policing in our self-proclaimed liberal polity. They persist because the police—as an institution—never falls from public grace. Politicians fall over themselves to praise them for their efficiency, bravery in the face of menacing criminal and, even more so, politically dangerous elements, even when confronted by sobering reports of misfeasance and unlawful conduct. From the Toronto Star, 8 July, 2010, GT1:

“City council voted 36—0 to ‘commend the outstanding work’ of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, his officers and other police during the G20 summit in Toronto…..[Mayor] Miller, who staunchly supported police while acknowledging concerns about specific incidents, said police were put in an ‘impossible situation’ by the requirement that they protect the G20 perimeter”.

Amongst politicians, this attitude is the norm, not an aberration. Police excesses are treated as aberrational, provoked by misfits focused on destroying widely shared Canadian values. The police norm is portrayed as a zealous adherence to basic liberal values propagated by the police’s democratically elected masters. This is why it was so important to the paramilitaries and their supporting cast of politicians to characterize the demonstration as having led to vulgar criminality on June 26. This is a repeated police strategy. It is a successful one. The general public remains convinced that the police is on its side This is why, after each outbreak of police lawlessness and after each thoughtful report and set of recommendations, the police are given more support, more money, more invasive technological weaponry, more lethal weapons and more encouragement. The actions taken on a report, on an inquiry—say a new structure, a new complaint or oversight regime—serve to re-legitimate a police force which is characterized as benign, if occasionally marred by a few rotten apples, a few mistakes.

This pattern enables the rulers to enable the police to act as a paramilitary force when needed or thought useful. This is the issue. The righteous anger aimed at the police behaviour during the G8/G20 is aroused because it was made clear to the demonstrators that their liberal democratic rights could be subjugated to force. This is why there were many cries about Ontario having become a Police State, one that did not respect democracy. The Force becomes the target to respond to the obvious attack on democratic entitlements. Truly, this makes sense: The Force repressed free assembly, free speech, free movement, freedom from arbitrary detention, etc. But, concentration on The Force—totally warranted as it is (and unlikely as it is to lead to great amelioration of police behaviour) tends to obscure a question that should be confronted directly:

Who has an interest in having The Force frontally attack and diminish our democratic institutions and potential?

The Hidden Force behind The Force—G8/G20 (the IMF,BIS, OECD, other acronyms) and TINA

The G8/G20 events gave rise to plaintively asked questions : Why have the G8/G20 summits in Huntsville and in Toronto? In fact, why do they meet at all?

Inherent in these queries is a sense of resentment. The mere fact that such summits were scheduled for Huntsville and Toronto was going to force progressive people to organize. They were going to have to demonstrate their displeasure. This was going to be inconvenient, at best, and lead to nasty confrontation, at worse. This shared sentiment explains many of the oft-heard arguments.

There were many eager to point out that, in a couple of days’ work, interrupted by promenades along a lake in a suit and by fancy dinners and by time-off to watch football, little of substance was likely to be wrought. It was widely understood that the agreements and non-agreements had been sorted out by politicians and their minions well before the formal meetings. The actual meetings were otiose. In this context, the to-be-expected inconvenience and confrontation, the huge cost imposed by having to deal with these predictable problems, were deeply and rightly resented.

The felt need to express opposition was a reaction to an agenda set by the G8/G20 and their fellow travelling acronyms.

Why do so many people feel that they must protest the presence of these acronyms in their neighbourhoods? There are a number of interrelated reasons.

Persistently, the visiting dignitaries were described by the tame media as the representatives of the richest nations on earth. Thereby the significance of their visit was established. They had the wherewithal to determine how everyone on the globe should live. More, the public-opinion moulding media and politicians of all stripes expressed no doubt that it was right that they should do so. To them it is obvious that the policies pursued by these powerful economic nations are the only polices worth pursuing. Wealth is to be created by private actors acting in their own interest; to this end, roving corporations looking for cheaper resources and labour, financial capitalists, banks, investment and insurance funds, are to be given a world to play in in which local domestic needs are to be subjugated to the unimpeded mobility of capital, inorganic and human resources. The maximization of private profits must be assisted at all costs. It will benefit everyone.

TINA: there is no alternative.

The New York Times’ influential and conventional gatekeeper, Thomas L.Friedman, noted that otherwise decent people did, as was their right, gather in the streets against (what he termed) the logic of globalization. But, paternalistically, he thinks of this do-gooderism as naïve and mistaken. They should understand, he wrote, that the G8/G20 agendas were “the poor’s best ladder out of misery” and they should be aware that “anarchists and leftover marxists” could abuse their soft-headed sympathy for the vulnerable to pursue anti-capitalist, that is, people-serving, ends.

The overlap between the repressive police forces and the G8/G20 cheerleaders becomes all too apparent. The G8/G20 are defending the public weal. That is, the G8/G20 folk are interested in the common good and are determined to promote it.

The spin spun to the media was that there was a good deal of disagreement amongst the G8/G20 as to how to do this this time around. This was meant to convey the impression that rich countries’ democratically elected governments were engaged in a serious, democratic kind of, debate. This depiction suggests an openness to ideas, to stakeholders’ interests. From the G8/G20 perspective, this benign picture had a bit of a downside.

The search for legitimacy by the G8/G20 forces by holding themselves out as democratic and pluralistic institutions means that neither the media, nor the G8/G20/The Force complex, could object to people expressing their views in a democratic, pluralistic manner. This means that demonstrations by people and groups who do not like particular outcomes of G8/G20 and other acronyms’ gyrations, have to be tolerated. But that tolerance is limited. The G8/G20 deliberations must be conducted in peace and tranquility. After all, as the G8/G20 have these very protestors’ genuine interests at heart, there is no call for protestors to question the raison d’etre, the legitimacy, of the G8/G20. It is proper to shield the G8/G20 from people who might exceed their acknowledged right to differ about outcomes by questioning the right of the G8/G20 to make decisions at all That would be going too far. There will then be a justification to use force, brute physical force, if need be, that is, the Force, to still this unacceptable dissent.

The trick, then, is to present the G8/G20 summits as necessary because they are occasions to have open-ended debate between democratically inspired leaders to deal with everyone’s problems in good faith. It is right and proper to support them; it is wrong and mischievous to disrupt them. Such disruptions, as opposed to festive and jolly marches to express some specific differences between the world’s proper leaders and some narrow self-serving interest groups, are anti-democratic and counterproductive.

But the view that the G8/G20 and other acronyms’ agenda is a democratic reflection of the people’s agenda is palpably untrue. Many people are acutely conscious that, inasmuch as the G8/G20 have a master plan, it is not working for a huge number of people, indeed, that it is working badly for the majority of humanity. This why people organize and march when the G8/G20 come to town. They protest the blatantly self-justifying claims by these acronyms that they have a right to make decisions that affect all of us. This is why we react.

There was no question of what the G8/G20 summits were all about. They were not about
(i) taking climate change seriously
(ii) taking the very powerfully and compelling Cochamba conferees’ proposals into account at all, let alone taking them seriously
(iii) redistributing of wealth in a globe where the G8/G20 machinations have bestowed an amount of wealth on 300 wealth owners that equals the combined wealth of 45% of the world’s population
(iv) thinking with an open mind about allowing nation states to promote import substitution policies as many once did or about re-thinking the supposed benefits of free trade or even free trade agreements that reward horrifyingly repressive regimes like that of Colombia
(v) honouring promises to some of the most vulnerable people on the globe made at previous summits
(vi) re-thinking the grant of private intellectual ownership of knowledge and practices that had belonged to peoples for generation
(vii) Etc…

They were not going to consider the aspirations and needs of billions of people. To the contrary.

The G20 communique was informed by a paper by the IMF, an acronym for a body representing invisible multinational corporations at the table of invitees while demonstrators faced The Force. The communique had been agreed-to well in advance of the Toronto meeting. So much for the fake anxieties obediently peddled by the media that there were some serious disagreements between the rich and powerful. The pre-arranged bottom line of the G20 was unmistakable. It was to ensure that the just bailed-out super rich in the super rich countries would not have to pay for the financial crisis that began to manifest itself in 2007. The communiqué stated that there should be no continuance of the stimulus as it had done its job— it had saved the major banks and their friends. Any more stimulus, the communiqué said, on the advice of the IMF, would ”undermine confidence and hamper growth”. Instead of stimulus, there was a need for creating more favourable profit-extracting conditions and for governments to get out of the debts they had incurred helping out the rich.

The unified purpose of the G8/G20 is easy to see: it is to co-ordinate the world on behalf of the ruling wealthy. The about–to-be imposed austerity programmes by the governments sitting at the G8/G20 tables will hurt the working classes and the already poor as governments, having agreed to being austere, are bound to cut unemployment, pension, welfare benefits, public education, public medical care, indeed all the social benefits that the working classes had taken so long to win. As David Olive, Toronto Star, 9 July, 2010, B1, pointedly notes about this programme of austerity:

“No one sought your vote on this.”

The arrogant, anti-democratic nature of these exercises is grasped by a lot of people. Not only the decisions, but the blatant disregard for the non-rich, for the vulnerable, rankles people who are daily told by the same leaders and their media that they, the people, matter. This is why they take to the streets whenever and wherever these kinds of gatherings are held. This raises a question: why do the G8/G20 and other acronyms have these meetings, knowing full well that they will create a bitter reaction?

Marginalizing Democracy

To retain a patina of legitimacy it is useful for the G8/G20 to pretend to have a debate in some spot where journalists can attend and report. Given that the rulers can, and do, make these crucial decisions before they ever meet to reveal them to the public, i.e., the invited journalists, why do they not hold the ceremonial meetings in places where their top-down decision-making cannot so easily be confronted by the expected people opposition? In part, this was done for the G8. The meeting in Huntsville was easily guarded and protestors who might, by their physical presence, try to speak about an anti-capitalist agenda, had little opportunity to create the kind of media-attracting circumstances that might raise awareness about the anti-democratic nature of decision-making that affects the lives of everyone on the planet, as well as the planet.

Thus the question: why not hold a meeting on top of an isolated mountain, in a luxurious, purpose-built ice hotel, with accredited journalists in attendance? Journalists, as the reporting on the actual conduct of the Toronto summit deliberations made clear, are easily handled by the G20 spin doctors. In alternate years, a luxury cruise boat, on the high seas, could serve these ends just as well.

This is not done because it would defeat one of the central goals of these summits in easy-to-observe places like London, Genoa, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and the like. Meetings in such cities show that the G8/G20 and other acronyms are not afraid of the public gaze, that they believe in the publics’ right to know and to participate, even by demonstrating their disagreement with the G8/G20, provided the members of these publics behave themselves.

They come to demonstrate their increasing power.
They come to tell us that our democratic rights are subject to their right to rule.
They come to tell us that they will let us have our democratic rights if we exercise them in a manner and in a zone designated by them.
They come to show us that they can exclude us from our public spaces.
They come to tell us that they can command our elected politicians to do their bidding.
They come to show us that our police and security forces can be used by them to limit our rights against them
They come to tell us that it is useless to resist what they decree.
They come because they are increasingly successful on all these fronts.

From Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star, 1 July, 2010, A16:”This past weekend, as I witnessed the crushing of dissent , the silencing of voices clamouring for justice for those who can’t speak out and the repression of young people who care more about climate change than consumerism, I wanted to weep for Canada. What had happened to the country that, in the aftermath of 9/11, did not fall into line with the Yes Sir, Yes Sir, Three Bags Full of Weapons of Mass Destruction? How did we come to the point where we are governed by a group of men who are as evolved as their theories of creation? How could we be so casually and brutally, for the sake of a $1.3 billion photo op, revoke our civil liberties? How is it possible that so many of us approve of these police actions?”

The G8/G20 and acronyms, orchestrated by the large corporations behind which, in turn, flesh and blood capitalists, operate and rule, are enemies of democracy. They are tyrannical. Their harm-doing is just as effectively nasty when done without a summit. The summits are their way to claim legitimacy for their harm-doing, at the same time as they constrain active citizenship. They use domestic police and security forces to act as their shock troops. These paramilitary forces carry out their tasks with relish, way too much relish. The more politically aware and brave folk whose conscience forces them to protest when these evil circuses (G8/G20, etc.) come to town, are frustrated by the limits put on them and enforced by the paramilitary forces. These forces become the target of their further agitations. This becomes the way to express their righteous anger over their loss of their democratic rights. Their struggles to reform the police forces are both necessary and tough to win. But, what must not be lost in the heat of battle is that it is those unseen capitalists, the corporations and the people who live behind their veils, who are the essential enemies of a decent society.

The G8/G20 leaders and their retinue have left Ontario. Wherever they are, they have not given up their agenda. They are actively pursuing it, to most of the world’s detriment. They are not in the least discomfitted by our fierce and angry attacks on our own police forces. For the sake of our civil liberties and out of self-respect, we must fight those battles. But they must not tire us out. We must also find a way to build on the momentum gained by making democracy the focus of our fight to improve the citizens’ control over the police. We must use this as a platform. We must make strenuous efforts to find ways to make the link between police oppression and the evil-doers who profit from those oppressors’ brutalities. It is an awesome task.

Harry Glasbeek is now a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School. He obtained his BA and LL.B (Hons.) from the University of Melbourne, his JD from Chicago. He is admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria and has taught law at Monash and Melbourne universities in Australia and at the University of Western Ontario. From 1974 to 1996 he was a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.

He has written books on Australian Evidence Law and on Australian Labour Law; on Canadian Evidence Law and on Canadian Labour Law. He has published over 100 articles and papers on torts, legal education, policing and racism, labour, occupational health and safety, corporations, corporate social responsibility, industrial manslaughter and corporate criminality. His latest book, his tenth, is Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law and the Perversion of Democracy, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003.