-----Original Message-----
- Subject: More on DC
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:23:50 EDT
Hi folks, This is just about the best analysis I've seen so far on the DC demo. Please pass it on. In solidarity, Ed
The Courage Of Protesters' Convictions
By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, April 19, 2000; Page B01
The Washington Post
From the window of my house on Capitol Hill, I could see a convoy of National
Guard vehicles, about a dozen jeeps and canvas-covered trucks loaded with
troops, headed downtown to protect the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund.
The convoy had been preceded by a two-block-long beeline of U.S. Capitol
Police motorcycles, the helmeted riders looking grim and ready to rumble.
And, as if all of that was not enough, an assortment of helicopters began to
appear low in the sky, including a black shark-shaped chopper with what
looked like a gun barrel protruding from its nose.
It was quite amazing to see our local law enforcement and national military
might meld into one big fist, ready to crush any and all at will.
Say what you will about the threat posed by protesters at the recent meeting
of global finance ministers; seeing how easy it is to turn this city into an
armed camp, where government force can be used indiscriminately and without
recourse against innocent bystanders--as well as news reporters and
photographers--struck me as far more disturbing.
In a matter of minutes, several platoons of D.C. police officers had cordoned
off 90 blocks of downtown Washington, in effect, cut out the heart of the
nation's capital. So much for our great symbol of democracy. For several
days, the police held the blockades with a vengeance, using pepper spray and
savage blows from their batons.
Better that the finance meeting had been held offshore, like other nefarious
cartels do, than to reinforce the image of our nation's capital as some
two-bit capitalist dictatorship.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey was portrayed as benevolent yet in
control as he walked around with a rose between occasionally tussling with a
protester or two. But Ramsey had back-up from the Pentagon, U.S. Marshals
Service, U.S. Capitol Police and the National Guard. All he had to do was let
protesters know that if they ran over his men, their next stop would be
soldiers from the group that made history at Kent State.
Not a pretty picture.
In the face of this insurmountable force, the courage and spirit of the
protesters became even more impressive. They were, for the most part, just
everyday people--musicians, teachers, skilled trades men and women among
them--who were bold enough to get up, stand up, for what is right.
One of them, Eric Larmand, a professor of philosophy at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor, drove a vanload of students for nine hours to
Washington. Why would a mild-mannered guy from the Midwest come this far and
risk getting beat up and tear-gassed, to say nothing of possibly spending a
night in the D.C. jail?
Larmand, like so many others, spoke of being moved by a force more powerful
than guns to do something, anything, that would help others to see the light.
(Quite frankly, it was refreshing to find such a large group of white people
taking a stand against racism and economic injustice.)
Nearly 1,300 arrests were made.
"Suppose a friend asked you for a loan, and you gave it but then demanded
that he pay it back so fast that he couldn't feed, heal or educate his
children," Larmand said. "That would be terrible. But that's exactly what the
IMF does: loans money to our friends around the world, and then behaves like
an international loan shark."
Alex Han, a guitar player, was among those who rode with Larmand.
"I really didn't know what to expect," Han said. "I just believe that this
gap between the rich and poor will come back to haunt us. If not me, then my
children or my children's children. When I heard that other people were
trying to take a stand against injustice, I wanted to be here to stand with
them."
Leslie Smith, a student of social justice at Antioch University in this area,
marched and attended several rallies.
"There is a deep connectedness between the peoples of the world, and we need
to be more aware of it," she said. "Erosions caused by destruction of rain
forests lead to floods that result in immigrants coming to this country. All
I want is for people to act with awareness that what we do affects others."
At a conference on World Bank policies sponsored by the Institute for Policy
Studies, several speakers highlighted the ways in which worldwide inequities
are mirrored right here in D.C.
The District, they noted, has suffered from exploitative development schemes,
closing of schools, eviction of residents, congestion and pollution, lack of
living wages, forced deterioration of neighborhoods for real estate
speculation and other injustices which, like IMF and World Bank policies,
benefit corporate interests and hurt the little guy.
Roger Newell, a member of the Teamsters, posed a question: What is the D.C.'s
main "cash crop"? The answer: prisoners, because the District, which has the
highest incarceration rate in the nation, is required by Congress to send a
certain percentage of its inmate population out of state to private
penitentiaries.
Seated in the van, preparing for the ride back to Michigan, Larmand and Han
bemoaned the police brutality and illegal searches and seizures that they
witnessed during the protests.
"The battle will continue," Larmand said. "In the courts for sure; in the
streets, I swear."
Power to the people.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
Courtland Milloy can be reached at (202) 334-7592
__________________________________________________
On the Net:
Mobilization for Global Justice, site for protesters
Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMF
50 Years is Enough!
WhirledBank
Jubilee 2000/USA
Friends, here's a thoughtful analysis, Ed Kinane
- Subject: MoJo Article on D.C.
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 00:28:53 EDT
Moving Toward a Movement?
The IMF/World Bank protests were a strong second step for the emerging
alliance of progressive forces fighting globalization. But can the activists
keep up the momentum to build a real movement?
by Vince Beiser
Mother Jones Magazine
April 20, 2000
So thousands of anti-International Monetary Fund/World Bank protesters
disrupted life in the nation's capital for two days. So their marches and
street blockades got enormous media coverage around the world. So what? In
the end, did the protests really have any meaningful impact?
That question really has two parts, tactical and strategic. The
immediate, tactical issue is whether the protesters succeeded in affecting
the way the World Bank and IMF do business. No, they didn't keep the
institutions' officials from meeting, as they did with the World Trade
Organization in Seattle, but while that's disappointing, it's really no big
deal and never was. After all, blocking access to a convention hall doesn't
disrupt the flow of world trade and investment; it just disrupts a meeting.
What's more important is the clear impact that mounting activist
pressure, of which the protests were only the most visible piece, are having
on the Bank and IMF. "The protests were definitely effective in shifting the
terms of the debate," says Medea Benjamin, director of Global Exchange, one
of the groups that helped organize last Sunday's street festivities. The
Bank and IMF have been forced onto the defensive, with officials tripping
over themselves to proclaim that they really are concerned about poverty,
Third World debt, and environmentally damaging "development" projects, all
of which critics say are the direct outgrowths of the institutions'
policies. World Bank president James Wolfensohn himself praised the
"enormous contribution" of groups that rallied for debt relief for poor
countries.
While that kind of rhetoric might be dismissed as talk-is-cheap
pandering, the protesters' pressure does seem to be bolstering those
bureaucrats inside the IMF and World Bank who want to genuinely reform the
institutions. Echoing another of the protesters' variegated concerns,
officials at the April 16 and April 17 meetings pledged to devote "unlimited
money" to combat AIDS in poor countries. And as the Washington Post noted,
"without the people in the street, it's unlikely that the word 'poverty'
would have cropped up quite so often" at the meetings.
In the end, however, the World Bank and IMF are only lightning rods.
The larger issue is economic globalization itself: the accelerating process
under which nations' financial, labor, and commodities markets are being
integrated into one big übermarket, much to the benefit of transnational
corporations but often at the expense of workers, the poor, and the
environment. The strategic question is whether such an amorphous concept,
with its loose-limbed collection of associated problems, can become the
basis of a genuinely broad-based, ongoing movement for progressive change.
Certainly, globalization has twice now provided a focal point to bring
together groups representing almost every important progressive tendency.
The marches in DC, as in Seattle, were filled out by union members,
environmentalists, human rights activists, prison reformers, ACT UP
chapters, and anarchist affinity groups. That coalition has sparked the kind
of energy not seen in the US for many years.
"It is a new movement," avers California state senator and former
Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden, who knows a thing or two about protest
movements. "Globalization is the issue that allows these multiple single
issues to coalesce. Environmentalists, unions, they all have their own
issues, but they all see them as the government not protecting them from the
effects of globalization."
And there are many in the corridors of power who sympathize. In early
April, five members of Congress released a sweeping "Global Sustainable
Development Resolution" calling for a wide range of steps to protect
international workers' rights and to reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.
Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank's own former chief economist, now denounces
the IMF's role in developing countries and calls for large-scale write-offs
of Third World debt. Even President Clinton at least rhetorically embraced
the demonstrators' concerns in Seattle.
It's hardly surprising, then, that globalization's critics have
already scored some small but significant victories. Activists can claim
direct credit for recent decisions by several major universities to stop
buying apparel from companies that fail sweatshop evaluations, and for
pressuring Starbucks to start buying fairly-traded coffee from small growers
in Latin America.
Still, none of that guarantees that a true movement will emerge. While
there are plenty of globalization-bashers in Third World countries, many of
whom turned out in Seattle, the bulk of the protesters both there and in DC
were the usual suspects: young, middle-class white kids. "The movement is a
little melanin-challenged," says Mike Dolan, deputy director of Public
Citizen's Global Trade Watch and a key organizer of the Seattle action.
"Washington is a mostly black city. It should have been easy to translate
the problems of structural adjustment into terms that would resonate with
the African-American community."
Nor can the protesters necessarily count on the continuing support of
organized labor, the force that brought most of the bodies into the streets
of Seattle, and one which wields far more clout with lawmakers than any mob
of slogan-chanting students. The AFL-CIO and other major unions threw their
weight into the battle in Seattle largely because the WTO's trade rulings
directly impact their members. In DC, unions endorsed the main anti-IMF/Bank
rally, but saved most of their energy for their own April 12 march against
extending trade privileges to China.
Much as it now enables the coalition to pull in all kinds of different
activists, the lack of a single, clear issue to focus around -- such as
stopping a war or abolishing apartheid -- may also prove a serious hindrance
to maintaining momentum. I asked one sympathetic-seeming onlooker what he
thought about the DC protests. "I don't know," he replied. "They seem to be
protesting a lot of different things."
These are all sizable stumbling blocks. Nonetheless, it's also true
that the conditions for organizing a global movement around global issues
are unprecedentedly auspicious. The Internet gives today's low-budget
activists mobilizing powers that their predecessors could only dream of,
providing cheap, easy, and instantaneous communication with and between huge
numbers of people all over the world. The Net and ever-multiplying global TV
networks, from CNN to the Discovery Channel, are also elevating (at least to
some extent) First World denizens' awareness of the world around them.
The dropping cost and increasing ease of international travel has also
brought a more immediate understanding of what it's like in the Third World
to those who live in the First. How many more of today's activists have
backpacked around impoverished countries than their counterparts of, say, 20
years ago? Just check out the latest Lonely Planet catalog to get an idea of
the answer.
In some ways, signing people up to fight for global economic justice
is also a far easier sell than, say, fighting against the war in Vietnam or
even for civil rights. The worst thing you're likely to be called is naïve;
no one's going to call you a traitor to your country or race. No one is
offended by the notion of helping the poor or saving rain forests. In fact,
a recent study of US attitudes on globalization found most Americans want
protections for the environment, labor, and the poor.
There's been a lot of talk comparing this protomovement to that of the
'60s, but a better comparison might be the first 30 years of the 1900s. The
decades around the turn of the 20th century were probably the last time
large numbers of union members marched in the streets with anarchists to
demand controls on the exploding power of big business. Then, as now, new
industries and technologies were fundamentally reshaping the world, vastly
enriching corporations while doing tremendous damage to ordinary people's
lives and the world around them.
In the end, despite its revolutionary trappings, that movement didn't
stop the triumphal spread of capitalism, but it did tame its worst excesses.
Child-labor laws, the 40-hour work week, basic workplace safety rules and
other protections were only some of the fruits of that struggle. Its nascent
modern-day descendant could do a lot worse than to recreate those victories
on a worldwide scale. The next round of major protests, at the Republican
and Democratic conventions this summer, will offer a clue as to whether it
has a chance to.
----------------------------------------------------
Read the entire article here: MoJo article
Check out the latest from the MoJo Wire and Mother Jones magazine at: Mother Jones
26 April 2000 – OP-ED on the IMF/World Bank & Bolivia by Ed Kinane for the Syracuse Post-Standard
- Subject: OP-ED on the IMF/World Bank & Bolivia
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 14:33:31 EDT
From: Ed Kinane, 340 Midland Av., Syracuse, NY 13202, (315) 478-4571
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