Revolutions
Edited by Ken Coates - The Spokesman 104
As if to offset the dismal reports from various battlefronts, the summit
of the G20 has been welcomed as a breakthrough in international
co-operation. But thoughtful commentators are now telling us to focus
not on the G20 nations, but the G2. The G2 are the United States and
China, and their accord is required if the agreement of the G20 to
treble the funds available to the International Monetary Fund is to
become a reality. The G20 thought it was necessary to multiply IMF
resources to $750 billion, and also to sustain a $250 billion allocation
of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which would enable the IMF to go some
way towards meeting the innumerable demands which are about to be made
on it. But all this extra money has to be gathered in, and if it is to
be made available, then the rules of the IMF will require serious
attention. This takes us back to the origins of the organisation.
Lord Keynes had proposed that the IMF should float a new currency unit
of account, the Bancor. Fierce and sustained opposition from the
Americans put a stop to this heresy, and anchored the post-war world to
institutions which depended on the dollar. Now the Chinese have
expressed their concerns about the reliability of the dollar, and
floated the idea of a ‘super-sovereign reserve currency’. Clearly the
Chinese intend to claim the honours for reviving the unalloyed wisdom of
J. M. Keynes.
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Russell Tribunal on Palestine
On 4 March 2009, the
Russell Tribunal on Palestine was launched at a press conference
in Brussels chaired by Stéphane Hessel, Ambassador of France. The
initiators of the Tribunal, Ken Coates,
Chairman of the
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation,
Leila Shahid,
General Delegate of Palestine to the European Union, Belgium and
Luxembourg,
and Nurit Peled,
winner of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought,
discussed why they called its creation.
Speaking for the Tribunal’s Organising Committee, the former Belgian
Senator Pierre Galand explained how it will work. Amongst more than a
hundred international personalities who have given their support to the
Tribunal, Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, Raji Surani, Jean Ziegler, François
Rigaux, Jean Salmon and François Maspero were present in Brussels to
give encouragement to this project.
In the tradition of the Russell Tribunal on War Crimes in Vietnam, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is a citizens’ initiative which aims to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and at raising awareness of the responsibility of the international community in the continuing denial of the rights of the Palestinian people.