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CounterPunch
October
2, 2002
From the Quarantine
Against Greed
by
MARK ENGLER
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.
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October 2,
2002
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
October 1,
2002
Benjamin Shepard
On the
Road Again:
IMF/World Bank Protest
Reveal a Revived
Movement for Global Justice
Dr. Susan
Block
Cockfight
at the
Baghdad Corral
Krystal Kyer
Growing Union Opposition
to War
Ron Jacobs
Born Without a Spine
Scott Loughrey
Mysteries
of 9/11
Jeremy Brecher
Collective
Security is Working
Brenda Norrell
Troy
Black Feather on
the American Flag
Sam Bahour
Wake Up
and Smell
the Occupation
Richard Harth
Contrary
to Reason:
Adieu, Hitchens, Adieu
Carol Norris
Rumsfeld
the Surrealist:
Things Related and Not
Ben Tripp
Lists Upon
Lists
September
30, 2002
Rep. Barbara
Lee
Alternatives
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Kurt Nimmo
Iraq: The
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Zeynep Toufe
"We
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Dave Marsh
The Troubador's
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Bush's
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Too True North
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