From: Joe Mischel (joe_mischel@eudoramail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 16:04:14 EDT
A web feature by the New Internationalist magazine:
http://www.newint.org/features/washington/index.html
From the Quarantine Against Greed
Mark Engler reports from outside the 2002 annual meetings of the
IMF/World Bank in Washington, D.C.
I.
Even without our protests telling them so, it must be obvious to the
finance ministers who attend the annual meetings of the IMF/World
Bank that their institutions are sick. Those inside the Washington,
D.C., headquarters can't feel so healthy after the year that passed.
It was a year when corporations that they nurtured and nourished,
like Enron, collapsed with little warning and less grace. When
countries that had long swallowed their prescriptions, like
Argentina, found themselves suffering from nauseous economies and
rashes of popular uprising. And when a critic they cut from their
innards like a malignant growth, Joseph Stiglitz, walked off with a
Nobel Prize.
If they care to listen to the protests, the ministers will hear at
least one diagnosis that explains their various ailments: "Infectious
greed." And they will learn that, as a remedy, thousands of activists
have joined a Saturday march to "Quarantine" them. Here on the
streets, Greenpeace wears white sanitary garb. The scores of police
present used mass arrests to overwhelm a much smaller number of
Anti-Capitalist Convergence protesters on Friday. But now they are
also enlisted in the pageant: Their barricades, the action suggests,
are needed not so much to keep criticism out, but rather to keep the
contagious delegates away from the general public.
There is no doubt that global justice chants echo through the meeting
chambers. But it is equally certain that the IMF and World Bank feel
less affected by our modest attempt at containment than by a global
state of siege that has constrained them in the past year. I was
intrigued to watch a short video on the Washington Post web site, in
which Citigroup USA Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer exhibits the
defensive posture of the meetings: "I think that every time there's a
crisis, every time there's a global slowdown, you're bound to have a
questioning of the policies that are being followed," he says. "My
guess is that if we were in a situation with global growth of 5% and
no major crisis in the emerging markets, you wouldn't have these
questions."
What is fascinating to me is that Fischer does not need to elaborate
the actual questions that compel his response. Here in Washington,
D.C., questions push in from all sides. They come from private
investors who hesitate to invest their confidence in IMF schemes and
from economists -- even from World Bank President James Wolfensohn
himself -- eager to disassociate themselves from the "Washington
Consensus" that ruled development thinking for two decades. The
questions come from a public distrustful of the corporate
representatives that hover around the meetings. And most of all,
questions come from countries in the global South, where eruptions of
outrage greet any IMF and World Bank representatives brave enough to
actually face the public, and where even some governments now ask,
"Is there a way to break free?"
During the Quarantine march, I walk with Mark Weisbrot, co-director
of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "That a country like
Argentina is now considering defaulting to the IMF is something that
would have been unimaginable even a few years ago," he says to me.
"Or look at Brazil, where the IMF tried to lock in the new government
to their policies. It didn't work. They haven't committed.
"There's going to be a lot more countries trying to figure out ways
to go around the IMF. It's happening slowly, but it's happening."
The prerogative of the ministers, it seems, is to prove that their
malady is nothing so serious -- that it's just a bit of a cold. As we
walk along amidst the drums and puppets, Mark Weisbrot and I are
joined by a journalist who has just visited the official proceedings.
"Inside, they're guardedly optimistic," she reports.
"Optimistic of what?" Weisbrot asks.
"Optimistic that it won't get worse."
* * *
II.
Three weeks ago a bulletin from the FBI's National Infrastructure
Protection Center, released to warn of potential terrorist activity
in the weeks surrounding the anniversary of the September 11 attacks,
devoted a full paragraph to the protests that ultimately assembled
this weekend. It infuriates me to think that the individuals who
write such alerts are the same people who are charged with protecting
the country -- that their "intelligence" cannot distinguish
legitimate threats to national security from past instances,
dutifully recited in the memo, where a few protesters broke some bank
windows. And yet this is not the last time that trade and terror
would intermingle during the weekend.
On Friday the police, seeing themselves as defenders of "critical
national infrastructure," moved swiftly against radicals who
threatened to disrupt traffic as part of a direct action dubbed the
"People's Strike." Those who turned out on the streets knew that a
crackdown had been forewarned. "Pre-emptive" (a popular term in
Washington, D.C. these days) was the word used to describe the police
attitude toward arrests. Even so, few among the 650 swept up expected
the authorities' response to be so nonchalant, the protections of
civil liberty so thin.
The officers hand-cuffed and bussed away as many as three hundred
activists who did nothing more severe than to gather in a public park
and beat drums against the impending invasion of Iraq. Police Chief
Ramsey was plain-spoken enough. He said simply, "The protesters put
themselves in a place to be arrested." And, from a certain
perspective, the logic was irrefutable. Never mind that the place in
question was Freedom Plaza.
By connecting the IMF and the World Bank to corporate scandal, the
protests this weekend seek to capitalize on one of the major themes
in U.S. politics. But another theme haunts the demonstrations. In the
press, the deliberations from Capitol Hill about how broad an
endorsement Congress will grant President Bush for his invasion of
Iraq dominate the front pages. Activist Maude Barlow, the chairperson
of The Council of Canadians, reminds us that Bush has rarely missed
an opportunity to use the war on terror to advance his trade agenda.
She quotes the President from the announcement of his
Administration's National Security Policy last week: "There is a
single sustainable model for national success," Bush said, "Freedom,
Democracy, and Free Enterprise."
For the people of the United States, this constitutes a shameless
politicization of our fear. When Bush stares down "the enemy," he
leaves no room for a vision of freedom based on open debate and
democratic self-determination. Rather, he pledges to wield the
military might at his command to enforce this "single model" -- one
where "free markets" and "free trade" rule.
You are either with us or against us, he says.
* * *
III.
"Let's face it," the writer Naomi Klein said on Friday when
remembering the A16 demonstrations that took place here two and a
half years ago. "Those protests were bigger."
She offers this analysis of the situation: "A lot of people aren't
here this week. But they're not here not because they don't care and
they're scared and they're not activists anymore. They're not here
because they're squatting in their cities. They're not here because
they're fighting against illegal deportations of refugees. They're
not here because they're building a rooted community movement."
It is an optimistic take. And her view is no doubt true -- in part.
However, it is also true that these times of war and recession are
difficult ones for global justice organizing in the United States.
The idea that media hype and the internet magic created the 1999
protests against the WTO is false. Seattle was not built in a day. To
construct that gathering it took almost a year of caravans,
coalitions, and cash advances. In its aftermath, we had the luxury of
riding a wave of unusual interest and excitement. But, as organizer
Mike Prokosch of Boston's United for a Fair Economy noted earlier
this weekend, "That wave is over."
By returning to the long and difficult process of churning up the
waters at its base, the institutions that make up the global justice
movement in the U.S. -- its unions, its environmentalists, its
community groups, and its collections of young radicals -- may well
ride high once again. Indeed, the escalating battle against the FTAA
will demand it in coming years. For now, however, the mood of our
Washington, D.C., protests is less "The Whole World is Watching"
than, "We Are Watching the World."
At a time when a rampant unilaterialism dominates this city, perhaps
this is a good thing. This weekend we viewed videos of South Africans
taking direct action to remove the filters that - like an extreme
version of a "low flow" showerhead - reduce their water pressure to
but a trickle. We hear stories of Brazilians defying warnings of
financial ruin to assert their right to elect officials that truly
represent them. And we read e-mail dispatches from London, where an
awesome crowd of 350,000 reportedly rallies against an invasion of
Iraq.
Oscar Olivera, a movement leader from Cochabamba, Bolivia, perhaps
did best to capture the importance of this battle against
provincialism. "The victories of the U.S. Government are not the
victories of the U.S. people," he said. And he suggested instead that
we learn about the successes of popular movements across the globe,
and that we begin to celebrate them as our own.
It is a wise counsel. For even as we quarantine greed in Washington,
D.C., we can hope that there exists a more potent contagion in this
world. Ours is the germ of infectious solidarity.
Mark Engler, a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York, can
be reached at <engler@eudoramail.com>. This essay first appeared on
the web site of the New Internationalist magazine, <www.newint.org>.
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