Report From The Pittsburgh G20 Summit: Day 1

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Giordano Bruno

Neithercorp Press – 9/24/2009

Walking downtown Pittsburgh today was like entering the Twilight Zone. The city was essentially at a standstill. Every road was edged with barricades, Blackhawk helicopters circled overhead, DHS agents with their insignia laden t-shirts and thigh holstered 9mm pistols chatted it up with National Guardsmen and walking stereotype spooks in sunglasses, suits, and earpiece radios. This was the closest thing to Martial Law that I had ever seen in my life, although I have the distinct feeling such sights will be more commonplace in the next few years. For a liberty lover like myself, this was stewed hell materialized in my cereal bowl, and I was losing my morning appetite.

Armored vehicles and unmarked cars stood on every street corner as I strolled out from the First Avenue T-Station. The public trolley service was the only way to get into downtown across the river, and only one stop was left open. A group of at least a hundred cops stood right outside the entrance fitting into full riot gear. Two bridges were open for vehicles into the city, each guarded by police checkpoints and military personnel. There was no point in trying to drive in, parking for non-G20 types did not appear to be available. Black cars with small flashing lights under the front bumper seemed to be able to pass through the checkpoints without any trouble. Perhaps they were dignitaries, or just more security. What appeared to be a police “motorcycle gang” rumbled around the perimeter, snaking python-like through the streets and grinning. It was a cop free for all, a cop bonanza, a freaking fuzz theme park, complete with animatronic humans. They were loving it.

Pittsburgh is a bloated city, for being so small. Bloated with pride and a grandiose sense of self-importance. It is a clinically obese woman with a strange musty odor who honestly believes all the guys have her “scoped.” I never liked it much. Many people who live here, in fact, don’t like it much, we merely tolerate it. It’s a city from another time, desperately clinging to what it was while trying to wallpaper on a new identity. If it were a person it would be schizophrenic, and probably would have hung itself in the shower by now.

The local news is nothing but story after story of Pittsburgh’s “greatness,” its unparalleled achievement, its shining example. Yes, surely, the G20 was here because Pittsburgh had made an impression on the world. Finally, the massive amount of ego people had invested in this city was about to be vindicated. Now, we would have something ‘tangible’ to boast of, instead of constantly having to verbally paint the slowly rotting town with sparkles and rainbows pulled from our collective asses. We could now wax sycophantic over the celebrity status of our new guests, and dream of the almost certain “opportunity” that would come knocking after them.

The average Pittsburgher, the yuppie Pittsburghers and the yinzers, truly believe that G20 will put our city back on the map. They truly believe that somehow, bastions of international investment and finance will come flooding into this place raining down money wherever they go. They think that foreign dignitaries will go home and romanticize about the Steel City, telling stories to their grandchildren about the one place in America where ambrosia flowed from the founts, and everything was so touchable and disinfected. The local radio talk shows gush over it. The suburbanites giggle and twitter like teenage girls while talking about it. The school kids write reports on it, on the “week that Pittsburgh changed.”

All I can say to those people is… reality is a bitch.

The total cost for city security alone to host the summit is estimated at around $20 million, money which I can say with certainty that the city does not have. The federal government has decided not to pony up much of the expense for the event, which leaves the local taxpayers holding the bag. The city council has had to beg and scrape to get money from the state of Pennsylvania. Cleaning up years of wear on major buildings and kicking out as many homeless people as possible costs a pretty penny, and we will NOT be getting any of that money back simply because G20 was held here. The city council acts as if it is an investment, when its really just a waste, a suckers bet on a two day choreographed love fest between puppets of state which people will forget about within a week. I’m sorry to say, but it will take far more than a couple days on the radar to save this town.

The real decisions on the world economy are not made by the G20, but by central banks, who can now only determine the rate at which everything collapses. They cannot stop it, nor do they want to. Consolidation is the name of the game. Centralization… of everything. That’s why we have the G20 in the first place. It’s about convincing the people of the world that a single unified direction, a single unified authority, a single currency, a single economy, is a good idea. It’s about taking more and more sovereignty and liberty from the people while pronouncing falsely that in return they will be more free. Even the security of G20 is about consolidation. I personally saw at least five different agencies I could identify including the National Guard represented on the streets today, and a few I couldn’t identify. Local cops, state cops, FBI, DHS, military, all working together hand in hand, skipping rope on the way to 1984. In the end, we are supposed to become “acclimated” to this sort of thing.

This is what people should be protesting. Not Capitalism, or Tibet, or Darfur, or the man-made Global Warming hoax, but the very existence of the G20, the IMF, and World Bank, and the threat they represent to the freedom of every person on this planet. All other issues are secondary.

There were, sadly, very few protests near the summit today. The police have been quickly breaking down any activist group larger than a few dozen with ruthless precision, claiming a lack of permits as their reason. The city had promised of course, for the past couple months, that protest groups would receive their permits and their right to assemble would not be impeded. As we said here at Neithercorp for the past two months, this was a lie. Some permit applications were approved, but as far as anyone can tell, the only group to get an actual physical protest permit was Al Gore’s “Alliance For Climate Protection” which was given the use of Point State Park on the 23rd even though all other groups were denied access. The only large protests so far have been organized at the outer edge of the city, and those have been attacked by police with gas and sound weapons all on the grounds of a lack of permits.

The city never had ANY intention of giving out those permits, they were just stringing activists along until it was too late. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Pittsburgh was chosen for a reason! And it wasn’t because its “charm” impressed anyone in G20. When the bridges are cut off, the city is a fortress. It was chosen because the G20 wanted no opposition from the public this time around. They wanted no evening news blitzes filled with mass marches and police brutality. They wanted absolute silence. And this is basically what they’ve gotten. While downtown, at first I just shook my head in disappointment. I figured that the protest groups had run scared, but the fact is, the city has made it nearly impossible. How can you have a protest when they start lobbing gas at you before you even get started?

There is one day left for the summit, and I will be in the city once again. Whatever will happen will happen. Once this summit is out of the way, I will turn my attentions back to the falling dollar and the possibility of hyperinflation, which could mean that oppressive scenes like that in Pittsburgh today will be coming to a city near you very soon.

Editor’s note: Thanks for reading. Please see also:

The G20 Discussion Group at 12.160

Our G20 footage on Youtube

Cindy Sheehan’s address to G20 Demonstrators

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