Los Angeles Times: World leaders pledge $40 billion to bolster 'Arab Spring'
Globe & Mail: G8 pledges $20-billion for Arab Spring countries
France 24: G8 – Leaders pledge $40 billion to Arab democracies
UPI: G8 to provide $20 billion in aid
Twenty billion, forty billion – which is it?
The Guardian is even more confused. It's sub-headline says 20 billion British pounds, which would roughly be 32.5 billion U.S. dollars, while the text says 20 billion dollars.
Tunisia and Egypt promised G8 help on path to democracy
G8 leaders support Arab spring goals by pledging £20bn in loans and aid to Middle East countriesG8 leaders has promised $20bn (£12bn) of loans and aid to Tunisia and Egypt over the next two years and suggested more will be available if the countries continue on the path to democracy.
David Cameron revealed he had intervened to prevent the package from being presented as more generous than it was in reality, suggesting that some at the G8 had wanted to present it as worth as much $40bn.
Cameron preaching reality – something smells wrong here.
Reuters goes with $20 billion and explains where the differences might come from:
G8 leaders promised $20bn in aid to Tunisia and Egypt today and held out the prospect of billions more to foster the Arab Spring and the new democracies emerging from popular uprisings.
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Most is in the form of loans rather than outright grants, to the two countries in the vanguard of protest movements which have swept the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Egypt and Tunisia are planning to hold free elections this year. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that on top of $20bn of credits provided by the World Bank and similar regional lenders dominated by the major powers, there would be as much again from other sources – $10bn from oil-rich Gulf Arab states and $10bn from other governments.
So Sarkozy promises other peoples money. Guess how much of that will arrive …
The piece also quotes the actual G8 statement:
Multilateral development banks "could provide over $20bn, including 3.5bn euros from the EIB, for Egypt and Tunisia for 2011-2013 in support of suitable reform efforts".
Ahhh – it could provide in support of suitable reform efforts. Suitable to whom?
The whole offer is just a carrot or bribe to get those countries to submit to the globalist agendas.
Not that such a big carrot would ever actually be delivered. As another Independent piece points out
Summit sources said that this figure included large sums already promised by the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
The only large amount of "new money" on the table was a promise of €2.5bn (£2.2bn) a year by the London-based, EU investment bank, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
…
Speaking after the summit, Mr Sarkozy stood by the $40bn figure. He said that pledges by other international banks and national contributions – including £110m in aid from the UK and €1bn of soft loans from France – should be added to the $20bn figure. He also threw into the pot, rather confusingly, "$10bn from the Gulf states".Summit officials said later that there had "certainly been no firm offer from the Gulf".
So all the big contradicting headlines are just lies. The only real money on the table is €2.5 billion, 3.6 billion dollars, from the EBRD which will be a loan that will have to be paid back, with interests, and which will have some likely horribly neoliberal conditions attached. This as part of the Saudi-U.S. counterrevolution. The money will be too little to make a difference and the stings attached will attempt to destroy the new movements.
As Soumaya Ghannoushi wrote a few days ago:
Washington hopes that these rising forces can be stripped of their ideological opposition to US hegemony and turned into pragmatists, fully integrated into the existing US-led international order.
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Containment and integration are not only political, but economic, to be pursued through free markets and trade partnerships in the name of economic reform.
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As usual, investment and aid are conditional on adoption of the US model in the name of liberalisation and reform, and on binding the region's economies further to US and European markets under the banner of "trade integration". One wonders what would be left of the Arab revolutions in such infiltrated civil societies, domesticated political parties, and dependent economies.
Submission to the G8 conditions would kill the revolutions. The offers should therefore be rejected.