Three E-mails from Beth Lerman on D.C.



-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Hunt
Date: Thursday, April 20, 2000 11:23 AM
Subject: [a16-dc-planning] FW: The Courage of Protestors Convictions

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

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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


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.

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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
In mid-April all eyes were on Washington, DC. Thousands had converged on DC to blockade the April 16/17 semi-annual meetings of the IMF/World Bank. The demonstrators -- the vast majority of whom were scrupulously nonviolent -- included scores of Central New Yorkers. Among them was the CNY/SOA Watch affinity group made up of about 20 folks from Ithaca and Syracuse.

Six of these, including Ann Tiffany and Rae Kramer from Syracuse, were arrested on Monday, April 17. Five days later they and over 130 others were released from the DC jail after paying a $5 fine for jaywalking.

Our affinity group was just one of eight SOA Watch affinity groups from around the country forming a coordinated cluster in DC. That cluster was just one of many clusters making a huge coalition of students, anarchists, organized labor, peace and justice groups, people of faith, environmentalists -- much the same cast who last fall endured the WTO police riot in Seattle.

(I say "police riot" deliberately. Contrary to the impression cultivated by the corporate-owned media, in Seattle by far the greater share of violence was perpetrated by those using truncheons, rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray. The police, however, chose not to attack or arrest the comparatively few masked vandals breaking windows. Such vandals, of course, received enormous publicity....)

In DC our group brandished a 15-foot banner designed by Kathleen Rumpf: "WTO, WORLD BANK, IMF, SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS -- ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY. SHUT THEM DOWN!" What, you may ask, does the SOA have to do with that dark trinity, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank? Plenty. SOA military repression is the flipside of the economic and environmental repression that they all impose on Latin America's poor. Those opaque, amoral, undemocratic, overarchingly powerful global institutions busy themselves sucking resources out of the South for the benefit of the North. Or, rather, a minute sector of the North: the banks and other corporations. They busy themselves undermining labor, destroying national self-sufficiency and sovereignty, and disrupting the planet's ecology.

The victims don't acquiesce without a gun to their head. In Latin America, as elsewhere, people resist. This makes it difficult to enforce the strings attached to IMF/World Bank loans. These strangling strings are known as structural adjustment policies (SAPs). They make a country more porous to Northern investment. Such investment means jobs in our communities are exported to countries where wages are artificially kept extremely low. In Latin America, the job of those trained at the SOA is to squash their fellow citizens' inevitable resistance to these SAPs.

Take Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. Its president, Hugo Banzer, is an SOA grad, and an exemplary one: his portrait hangs in the SOA Hall of Fame at Fort Benning. Back in the seventies it was Banzer who authored the Banzer Plan targeting church people. Banzer deported Fr. Roy Bourgeois, then a Maryknoll missioner, for working with Bolivia's poor. Fr. Roy is the founder of School of the Americas Watch. In 1998 Bolivia had the third highest number of soldiers at the SOA.

In early April, 2000 Banzer declared martial law. It seems that the World Bank -- as part of its SAP -- is forcing Bolivia to privatize government utilities. In a secret deal a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary, seeing its chance to make big bucks, bought the water supply of Bolivia's third largest city, Cochabamba. Bechtel immediately jacked up the rates. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 saw their water bills jump to $20 a month -- more than they spend on food. And probably not much less than highly-paid World Bank bureaucrats pay for water in the suburbs of Washington, DC.

When Cochabambinos demonstrated against this extortion and theft of their water supply, a plainclothes officer, behind a line of uniformed soldiers, fired into the crowd. Victor Hugo, 17, was killed with a bullet through his face. The sniper, Captain Robinson Iriarte de La Fuente -- surprise, surprise -- took combat weapons training at the SOA.

Iriarte and Banzer aren't the only SOA heavies. According to the Andean Information Center, Cochabamba's new military governor, Gen. Walter Cespedes Ramallo, is also an SOA grad. He was the Commander of the Joint Task Forces (a combination of military and police forces) in the Chapare coca-growing region in 1998. During road blockades and resistance, 15 farmers were killed, others were brutally tortured and many were wounded. This February Cespedes was charged by an investigative judge with negligent homicide in the death of three of these campesinos. The judge has since been receiving death threats.

The IMF/World Bank is the global loan shark. When countries can't pay back their loans fast enough, their own militaries -- armed, trained and bought by the US -- squeeze the blood out of the stone.

------------------------------

Note: For updates on the Bolivian crisis, contact Kathryn Kledebur of the Andean Information Center or Jim Shultz in Cochabamba.

Suggested titles: "Jaywalking for Justice," or "Squeezing the Blood out of the Stone," or "WTO, World Bank, IMF & School of the Americas: One Big Happy Family."

Ed Kinane is a local activist and member of the SOA Watch national advisory committee. Ed has twice gone to prison for his nonviolent protests against the School of the Americas.###

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