Someone forgot to bring the circus music to the G7 summit

Someone forgot to bring the circus music to the G7 summit

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — The leaders of the G7 Western mafia comprised of Canada, France, Italy, Germany, the US, Britain, plus Japan and unelected European Commission President “Queen” Ursula von der Leyen and also Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who hitched a ride on a French government plane like it was an Uber, just met in Hiroshima about our collective fates. And the outcome suggests that we’d be better off led by the next handful of clowns who stepped into the big tent of a traveling circus.

As the saying goes, you can’t expect to save the world when you can’t pay the rent, and these leaders can barely manage their own affairs without constantly running cap in hand to the taxpayer, but they’re nonetheless confident about tackling global challenges for which they’ll never be held accountable. That’s one of the great things about democracy for those in charge: short political cycles that mean the guy who messes everything up will have peaced-out by the time the check comes due.

While downing hiba beef, which comes from cows like the ones the European Union recently demanded that Dutch farmers get rid of or sell to the government for the climate’s sake, our confidently inept leaders reiterated their commitment to limit the rise of the temperature of the room we call Earth to 1.5C compared with pre-industrial levels. And they insist on doing that through “net zero” emissions — a policy that’s so ridiculous that Western companies are routinely chastised by think-tanks for faking it and gaming the carbon credit system.

Wall Street is shady enough, so who could have possibly guessed that a market based on actual air could possibly attract more corruption than actual results? Nonetheless, our fearless leaders are sticking to the failed program. And why wouldn’t they? What other pretext for taxation has been so overwhelmingly successful to the point of causing the widespread marginalization and browbeating of those who disagree with it, despite its demonstrably poor performance?

Defense hypocrisy was also served up on the menu. “We reaffirm the importance of disarmament and non-proliferation efforts to create a more stable and safer world,” reads the meeting’s final communiqué. We’re talking here about the same countries that are helping to turn unstable Ukraine into the most armed country of the European bloc that it seeks to integrate, by loading it up with weapons. This despite the fact that this year Transparency International has ranked Ukraine as a corrupt country. Perhaps my dictionary is different from those of these brainiacs, but isn’t this precisely the opposite of disarmament?

But at least these leading proponents of weapons non-proliferation are keeping track of exactly where all their weapons are ending up so they don’t end up in the wrong hands, right? “[The] sheer volume of arms delivered, including tens of thousands of shoulder-fired Javelin and Stinger missiles, portable launchers and rockets, creates a virtually insurmountable challenge to tracking each item,” according to the New York Times earlier this month, citing experts. Whoops.

Meanwhile, our democratically elected arms dealers also express their “grave concerns regarding Iran’s continued destabilizing activities, including the transfer of missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and related technologies to state and non-state actors and proxy groups.” The West has long specialized in training proxy fighters — usually referred to as “rebels” — for recent conflicts from Syria to Libya and previously in Afghanistan and Latin America. As for Iran contributing drones to the Ukraine conflict, well, they’re not exactly the F-16 fighter jets that a senior White House official suggested to be in the works for Ukraine, according to NBC News.

Iran has some big clown shoes to fill if it has designs on prat-falling around the world.

They also stuck their big red noses into Syria, where peace broke out, despite their efforts over the better part of a decade to regime change incumbent President Bachar al-Assad. “We reaffirm that the international community should only consider normalization and reconstruction assistance once there is authentic and enduring progress towards a political solution,” they say. They’re pulling the escalator up by the handrail here. Syria’s neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia, who cooperated with the US to fund its “rebels” to oust Assad, have just welcomed him back into the Arab League fold. He even gave a speech earlier this month citing the Arab world’s need to chart its own course.

So it doesn’t look like these energy-rich Arab states, who also seem to be on the verge of normalizing relations with Iran, need the G7 to bless any “reconstruction assistance,” particularly when it largely benefits Western corporate interests.

And to complete the show, they made any remaining self-awareness vanish in asserting that “the global economy has shown resilience against multiple shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and associated inflationary pressures.” How many of these things would never have been problems in the first place if these G7 micromanagers and control freaks weren’t so meddling? “We need to remain vigilant and stay agile,” they continue, adjusting their curly rainbow wigs. But maybe we’d all be better off if they just gave their act a rest.