April 13 - 20, 2000
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Jerry Knight's path to Washington, DC this week went through a jail cell in Seattle. Warm-up act(tivism)
It's hard to say how big Sunday's protest against the IMF and World bank will shake out. But if the opening acts are any indication, things are going to be interesting.
by Ben Geman
The 33-year-old postal worker and Seattle resident recalls that he went to check out last year's demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) more as casual observer than activist and liked what he saw. When the police turned on residents of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood where he lives and he got pepper sprayed in the face, he got mad. The next day he demonstrated and got arrested.
Wednesday afternoon he stood on the grass in front of the Capitol in Washington DC at a union rally against President Clinton's push to grant normal trade status to China, which would pave the way for the country's entry into the WTO. It's one of the many events preceding the planned rally and civil disobedience against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank on April 16, when activists will try and blockade the joint meetings of the two, an event that anti-corporate globalization activists are calling the follow up to Seattle's demonstrations. In Seattle, the climactic demonstrations that temporarily shut down the WTO on November 30 were called "N30." In DC, the tag is A16. The build-up to A16, a slew of forums and smaller protests, is called the Mobilization for Global Justice.
To Knight, who's wearing a black T-shirt that reads N30/A16: THE BATTLE HAS JUST BEGUN, says "This part of my life is called waking up in my 30s. I feel like I've just awoken from a long nap."
In a way, labor may have just woken up, too. There was an April 12 rally protesting Clinton's push to normalized trade relations with China -- technically an issue separate from the IMF and World Bank protests -- that drew about 10,000 protesters. In the meantime, big labor has endorsed the "permitted" rally A16, on the Ellipse near the White House that will start hours after activist try and block the IMF and World Bank meetings. The ties between labor and the kaleidoscope of young anarchists, human rights and environmental advocates, and others who succeeded in shutting down the WTO are tenuous, but real."I think there is a growing consensus that we should not just stand up to protect our own jobs and conditions, but other workers around the world," says Lisa Hoyos, the political organizing director of the South Bay AFL-CIO in San Jose at the rally where labor leaders like AFL-CIO president John Sweeney spoke. "And the IMF and World Bank weaken standards for workers."
The number of people willing to act on that line of thinking has the DC police force mobilized, big time. Over 1500 officers are reportedly preparing to meet protesters on A16. Don't even think about trying to get near the glassy World Bank building downtown or the IMF headquarters next door these days (unless it's Sunday and your goal is to shut down a meeting and maybe get arrested in the process). Barricades have been erected around them and the police presence is heavy.
Down an alleyway off Florida Avenue sits the "convergence space," where activists are meeting and training for A16, swapping information, and making food and puppets. The crowed is mostly young and probably has more piercings, dreadlocks, and bandanna headwear than a cross section of the twentysomething population at large. This is the meeting space of spokescouncils (made up of members of affinity groups) and affinity groups. Affinity groups are small bands of activists -- ranging in number from just a handful to about 20. The groups are independent of one another but coordinate their activities when planning "direct action" protests and civil disobedience. Affinity groups may form clusters or groupings depending on the action.
It's highly organized -- some members plan to get arrested, others serve as medical monitors and "action elves" -- people who, according to the "action guide" will help members of affinity groups with access to water, first aid, or other forms of support during the direct action. The affinity group structure is central to the protest organizing for A16 and with good reason -- it proved incredibly effective organizing method in Seattle, where different affinity groups blocked myriad intersections downtown.
All around, young activists are engaged in training in non-violence, media outreach, and other skills that will come in handy this week and beyond. "It's all more organized than it looks," says Adam Eidinger, an A16 organizer. "There are a lot of jobs that people have taken on and associated themselves with, saying this is what I will do. ... This movement is about people finding their role." For Eidinger, it's also about losing a role -- the 26-year-old was let go from his job for Democratic political consulting firm Rabinowitz Media this month due to his work with the Mobilization.
That makes him somewhat of a known name around A16 events. His firing was the lead part of a recent Washington Post story on the Mobilization. Adam is my "media escort." The press is allowed in, but while the organizing appears diffuse, it's also a tight structure -- media are allowed around only with someone like Adam leading them around. Some workshops are public. Some are not. Plainly, they don't want word of direct action planning leaking out in advance.
"Is [the] anti-oppression [workshop] open?" asks Sarah Seeds, another escort, of other organizers when I ask where I can go. Turns out it is open, so I'm led to the second floor, where 25 or so mostly young activists are sitting in a circle, with 32-year-old Alli Starr "facilitating" the workshop. The goal is understanding things like privilege and lack of it and building respect for one another in this diffuse movement. "We are trying to heal within this movement so we don't recreate the same kind of oppression perpetrated by these global institutions," she tells me. "If we see our commonality we can connect the dots and connect our struggles."
Thursday, downtown Washington: "This is what a police state looks like!," chant dozens of activists on a Washington DC street corner. "This is what a police state looks like!""This" at mid-day is a street corner near the National Press Club, where police holding batons -- something that has a way of raising the stakes -- are keeping a crowd of 100-150 protesters less than a block from the club from getting any closer. It's too far for the activists' liking, given who's inside: Michael Moore, head of the World Trade Organization. Activists have converged in the location from at least two separate earlier protests on sweatshops and logging of old-growth forests. Under the watchful eye of police, another Michael Moore, this one a grotesque costume about eight feet tall, tells the crowd to forget it. "This is a no protest zone," he bellows. You have no first amendment rights. This is corporate globalization."
Near the press club on Thursday, the police hold their ground. The protesters don't challenge the blockade they set up with their bodies and yellow tape (although within a few hours one young activists has appropriated some of the tape as a headband). But it's a nice teaser of what's to come this weekend. "Did we shut them down in Seattle?," asks Medea Benjamin of San Francisco human rights group Global Exchange to the crowd as police look on, and, at some points during the protests, take film. "Are we going to shut them down on Sunday?" The answer is an enthusiastic yes.
If the protesters are feeling up, it's because earlier in the day some of the those who converged on the press club after various earlier events and demonstrations got a taste of victory. Global Exchange had planned an earlier protest against Starbucks. Activists had been in the launch phase of a campaign to pressure the giant coffee chain to buy "fair trade" coffee, beans bought from small, environmentally sustainable farm purchased at a fair rate. But this month the company agreed to buy the fair trade coffee for $1.26 a pound, netting the Latin American farmers a lot more than the 30 to 40 cents they get in "free trade" coffee, according to Global Exchange. "We are trying to direct some of the profits from these companies down to the grassroots," says Kevin Danaher, one of Global Exchange's leading activists, outside the Starbucks at Dupont Circle. "All we wanted to do was give consumers a choice. Here's plantation coffee, here's fair trade coffee." Now, he says, with momentum building, the campaign will target other coffee companies. "When you get the big dog to genuflect," he says hopefully, "The non-alpha male dogs get the message real quick."
The biggest alpha dogs are not Starbucks or even the Gap, where activists marched to protest between the Starbucks "celebration" and the stab at getting to Michael Moore on Thursday. No, the biggest dogs would be of course the World Bank and the IMF, which activists fault for a number of reasons. To protesters, the World Bank and the IMF set the stage for multinationals to thrive, with dubious effects for the general populace in countries where, for example, the bank helps with development projects or the IMF loans money. Probably the biggest beef activists have with the agencies are "structural adjustment programs" that come along with loans, which have or still do impose conditions like cuts in spending, privatization, trade liberalization, and orientation of the economy towards exports. Activists also say World Bank and IMF policies are bad for the environment. By encouraging trade liberalization, exports and austerity in their lending, the IMF and World Bank weaken the ability of indebted countries to protect their ecosystems. Critics also charge that the two institutions aren't accountable to the public.
Yet that critique and the notion that the Bank and IMF policies exacerbate poverty is labeled by the agencies themselves as too simplistic or just flat wrong. Walking toward her job at the World Bank early Thursday morning, one 36-year-old bank employee who declines to give her name tells me the agency tries to work with in collaboration with the people that development projects are targeted to assist. "The demonstrators don't have a clue," she tells me as workers flashing ID tags stream past police and barricades set up on H street in front of the side-by-side headquarters of the two agencies. "I don't think they have the real picture, the whole picture ... You can't get a deal done without going through the stakeholders. It's not just the world bank making decisions."
It's not unlike comments made by World Bank head James Wolfensohn at a news conference a day earlier, which I view on C-SPAN Wednesday night. He says he finds the Mobilization for Global Justice "demoralizing" because bank staff believe they are being accused of not helping the poor when "you think that's what we are doing every day." Also, he says, the bank has been responsive, reaching out "extensively" to non-governmental organizations.
Back at the convergence space on Thursday afternoon, I'm introduced to Davie Malungisa, coordinator of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development. According to Malungisa, the verdict on the World Bank and the IMF is clear. He says that since structural adjustment began in Zimbabwe in 1990, poverty has nearly tripled. "I would like to see them [the bank and IMF] abolished," he says. "They have created poverty and they have no moral legitimacy to come into our countries as reform institutions and say they want to solve poverty."Clearly, many of the activists organizing for A16 have different motivations. And different ideas about what changes need to be enacted at the IMF and World Bank. But they are united in a desire to shut down the weekend meetings à la Seattle. And they are united in a desire to see global policies carried out democratically. Medea Benjamin says there are two tiers to the globalization problem. In the near term, she says, activists must pressure the World Bank and IMF to adopt better policies. Activists, for example, charge that the World Bank, despite its promises to do better environmental planning, still gets involved with destructive projects. In the long term, Benjamin says, the goal is to replace these institutions with others that are accountable to the public and more representative of the populations they purport to serve.
