Seattle Revisited: Report on the April 16 World Bank Protests in Washington, D.C.

Less Bank -- More World
Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

WASHINGTON -- "Brothers and sisters! We've already won the Battle
of Washington,"; said Lori Wallach, head of Ralph Nader's Global Trade
Watch, to a teach-in of 1,500 people last Friday night -- two days before
the street skirmishes began. "Now, all that is left is the mopping-up
operation."

Before a single demonstrator even took to the street during last Sunday's
much-heralded A 16 showdown against the meetings of the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank, Wallach could make her boast,
because the publicity and dialogue generated around these two normally
obscure institutions of global finance had reached unprecedented
proportions.

Now, two days of hot protest, 1,300 arrests and metric yards of good
expository newspaper copy later, the decisive victory can be claimed.
Ten, 15, maybe 20 thousand determined and delightfully young
protesters have forced the officials of the IMF/WB into a
never-before-seen political retreat: an avalanche of statements and
communiques promising more accountability, more sensitivity, more
attention to the needs of the Global South -- the impoverished nations
that the protesters claim are the prime victims of these two international
agencies.

Of course, it's a feint. "This is mere evasion, but still significant progress
in tearing down the facade of the official consensus," says author William
Greider, an early chronicler of the global economy. "The fact is, nothing
like this has happened before in my memory -- a strong and confident
protest aimed at institutions that are quite obscure to most Americans.
The officials are used to hearing rage and scorn from poor countries but
not from the capital of capitalism. Americans, much more than others in
the world, are in need of education, and this event advances that project."

Not too shabby a follow-up after the earth-rattling showdown in Seattle
last winter around the World Trade Organization. Irony or not, just at a
time when the dot-com consensus of the permanent boom seems to be
crashing, anxious Americans are in the streets -- for the second time since
Thanksgiving -- protesting the inequities of global capitalism and
international trade. Roll over, Francis Fukuyama.

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

A 16 was hastily organized in the electric aftermath of Seattle. The
exuberance and exhilaration coming out of the anti-WTO protests
seemingly just had to find another, quick and equally dramatic
expression. The young activists of the leaderless and amorphous Direct
Action Network (DAN) -- the street soldiers of Seattle -- soon set their
sights on the annual meeting of the IMF/WB, an ordinarily prosaic
confab that traditionally drew no more than a few dozen dogged
demonstrators and picketers.

Some Seattle veterans quietly objected. That awesome
student-worker-environmental alliance -- that marriage of Teamsters and
Turtles -- forged in the anti-WTO demos, they said, could not be
reassembled in Washington. Organized labor, they argued correctly, was,
plain and simple, not going to sign on to sitting in the streets and getting
arrested over something as obscure as the austere structural-adjustment
programs of the IMF. But DAN persisted.

And as the protests finally unfolded this past weekend, the differences
between Seattle and D.C. were, in fact, immediately evident. Where youth
and students made up maybe half the marching contingents in Seattle,
here they were the virtual totality.

As a drizzly dawn broke over the streets of Washington on Sunday, April
16, conspicuously missing from the ranks of the protesters were the
satiny red jackets of the Steelworkers, the blue-and-gold of the
Teamsters, the black-and-white of the Auto Workers or the sea-green
logos of unionized public employees. Instead, the streets filled, as one
DAN organizer affectionately called it, with the "creme de la grunge." Or
to quote one Washington Post stylist, an ocean of kids all dressed "in
generic lint-colored clothes."

And yet, brimming with pluck and tenacity, these students from Berkeley
to Evergreen State, from U.T. to UVA -- many of them seasoned veterans
of the anti-sweatshop wars -- marched and danced under their
magnificent giant papier-mache puppets. A towering 20-foot shining and
smiling sun, its outstretched arms carried aloft by squads of marchers,
gave the lie to the corporate spin that these kids were some sort of
flat-earth deniers of the world community: Its emblazoned slogan
proclaimed boldly, "Globalize Liberation."

"Less Bank! More World!" the activists chanted as -- in the
early-morning hours -- they systematically and peacefully occupied the
18 intersections that surround the IMF/WB complex. Yes, the police and
the 16 other law-enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction in D.C. had
gotten there first and set up barricade fences and a heavily armed
perimeter at times bolstered by armed personnel carriers. And, yes, the
authorities had roused the finance ministers and delegates of the IMF at
4:30 in the morning so they could be bused under armed guard and
through underground tunnels into the besieged meeting. And, yes, the
ultraegalitarian, no-leader ethos of DAN sometimes seemed to melt in
rudderlessness.

But no matter. DAN, and other organizations, had divided the city up
into 14 different "slices of the pie," and each separate face-to-face affinity
group took up its assigned position. So-called "action elves" -- some
called them "vibe monitors" -- made the rounds bringing water and
succor to the protesters. Chartreuse-capped legal monitors, notebooks in
hand, kept a steely eye on the cops. And group after group, slice after
slice, the kids sat down right in front of the police barricades, locked
themselves down with their so-called "sleeping dragons" (galvanized
pipes that linked and covered their arms and made arrest cumbersome),
or they tied heavy-duty steel cables around their necks and waited out the
day, clapping and singing and napping as the rain turned to a summerlike
sunbath.

I spent the day moving from intersection to intersection along with a
principal organizer of my generation's street protests, Tom Hayden, who
had inconspicuously flown in to participate. He kneeled on the sidewalk
and quietly chatted with the locked-down protesters and readily soaked
up their passion. "It's like the South in the 1960s. You see what is
intolerable around you -- 1.2 billion people today in the world making
less than a buck a day. That's intolerable," Hayden said. "In the '60s,
young people filled the jails because they refused to enter a corrupt
system. That's what we are seeing again."

Where, in Seattle, about 75 black-clad anarchists grabbed the media
spotlight as they took their ice hammers to the plate glass of Starbucks
and the Gap, the anarchist D.C. "Black Bloc" swelled into the hundreds.
But not a single window was smashed. When the rowdy anarchist
contingent, blazing their flags, poured into and took over the narrow
streets around George Washington University, the D.C. Metro Police
struggled to establish a perimeter. But the line just wouldn't hold. The
cops fell back one block, then two. When reinforcements arrived, they
briefly held an intersection. But the anarchist push was too much. The
cops set off two harmless smoke bombs and then, with disciplined
precision, pulled back, retreated into a bus and sped away in retreat.
"Whose streets? Our streets!" the anarchos jubilantly chanted as they
lifted and shook their garbage-pail shields high in the air.

A few brief skirmishes flared during the day. About 20 scattered arrests
went down. A bit of pepper gas was sprayed. A couple of protesters were
unnecessarily injured. But, by and large, the D.C. police showed
flexibility and restraint and -- at least inadvertently -- revealed the Seattle
cops to be the woeful, podunk department they are. The D.C. cops did
display a few, and crucial, flashes of hubris. On the day before A 16, they
raided the crowded crash-pad headquarters of the direct-action squadron
and shut it down on fire-code violations. And that same afternoon, they
bottled up a completely peaceful but unauthorized sort of warm-up march
and pinched 600 detainees, putting a sizable bite in the next morning's
street-troop strength. But the panicked and violent overreaction, the
rubber bullets, and the gales of pepper spray and tear gas that
characterized Seattle were all, gratefully, absent.

By early afternoon, the 90-block area around the IMF complex was
occupied by the police, its perimeter by the demonstrators. The point was
made: no more global-business-as-usual. And a celebratory march of
maybe 10,000 circled the sealed-off downtown, eventually peeling away
the clumps of demonstrators from their blockaded intersections.

That night, 500 activists crowded into a church basement to plot the next
day's activities. They figured their troop strength would be down on
Monday morning to about 2,000, with some 800 willing to be arrested. A
consensus was reached that by 5 the next morning, groups of
demonstrators would blockade the four hotels lodging the IMF delegates.

But a torrential downpour and a rabid electrical storm washed away the
carefully drawn plans. Once again, the IMF delegates made it to their
meeting. But by noon, the 2,000 or so protesters materialized in
downtown Washington, marching in and against traffic and playing a
volatile cat-and-mouse game with a much more cranky corps of cops --
now buttressed by camouflaged National Guard units.

Several flash points erupted along the broad lengths of Pennsylvania
Avenue, and as many as 200 more protesters were arrested. And then, by
noon, a huge and tense standoff jelled at the corner of 20th and Penn,
barely a block from the IMF nerve center. But bloodshed was averted
when negotiations between police and protesters produced a unique deal:
The cops would open a passage in their steel barricades, and, in groups of
10 at a time, the protesters would be allowed to peacefully cross the line
and be arrested. By the end of the day, another 400 demonstrators
volunteered to break the law and be arrested to symbolize their fight for
global justice.

Steelworkers and Students

The victory march around the city on the afternoon of A 16 began on the
expansive grounds of the Capitol's Ellipse. In the last few weeks before
the A 16 action began, Washington organizers had picked this location
as the site for a legal, permitted rally -- a gathering point for those who
wanted to join in the demonstrations but not risk arrest. Late in the game,
the AFL-CIO endorsed the legal rally and essentially took over its
organization. The crowd of maybe 10,000 was addressed by a panoply of
speakers, from Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader (whose
volunteers collected 1,500 new names at the rally), to TV jokester
Michael Moore, to populist Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who
charmed the crowd by singing a verse of "This Little Light of Mine."

But the most fiery moments of the legal rally were provided by the crusty
international president of the United Steelworkers, George Becker. Using
rhetoric unimaginable as recently as five years ago in the American labor
movement, he brought the crowd to a rousing ovation when he
thundered:

"Why in the hell are we in the streets of D.C.? Because our leaders
betray working people and go against the principles we hold dear as a
nation. What happened last night was a disgrace," he said referring to the
arrest of the 600 peaceful demonstrators. "Everything we value was
trampled on ... The government refused to let you exercise your
constitutional rights to protest ... This is the power of the corporate state
controlled by multinational corporations; the betrayal of working
America by the IMF, WTO and WB!"

Then, pointing his comments to the gathered youth, Becker added: "In
Seattle, you shocked the government and world institutions. You shook
the establishment to the roots of the system, you challenged the status
quo ... The world was forced to listen to you ... You have an idealism that
holds no bounds. If this is going to be a better world, it is up to your
generation to change history. And history is on your side ... You put your
convictions on the line time and time again. That's why we won in
Seattle, and that's why we are going to win in D.C."

Earlier in the week, organized labor flexed its political muscle during the
A 12 action. A number of unions, but most prominently the Teamsters
and the Steelworkers, joined with activists of the Citizens Trade
Campaign and produced 15,000 workers to conduct a "citizen lobby." Its
one single-minded goal: to block the Clinton administration's aggressive
legislative push to grant permanent normalized trading relations to China.
Early on in the run-up toward A 16, some prominent activists argued that
this pressing trade issue, and not the IMF/WB, should be the major focus
after Seattle. That argument was lost, but A 12 was a resounding success,
and the administration is currently struggling uphill to find the votes it
needs to win the China pact.

Not Where -- but What?

HOW TO keep labor in the blue-green coalition emerging post-Seattle is
the question crucial to the expansion and consolidation of the new
movement for global justice. There was certainly nothing about A 16 that
weakened the fledgling alliance. But it's not clear either that A 16
strengthened it.

The magic of the explosion in Seattle was that it shattered the prevailing
official consensus on the international economy. It opened up a much
needed space to discuss and review some of the more complicated facets
of globalization. And Seattle was, in some ways, beginner's luck. Its
militant tactics are the sort usually seen as a social movement crests, not
as it is born. So the world after Seattle is fraught equally with opportunity
and peril. Opportunity to enrich and broaden a citizens' movement for
domestic and international economic justice. But also the danger of
letting tactics outpace and overwhelm political strategy. "That's definitely
a concern," says Tom Hayden. "But that's a logical outcome when
politics fail, when electoral politics are bankrupt. Your response can be
extreme when you feel no one is listening."

Indeed. Capitalism is neither reformed nor threatened by a string of
shut-down meetings or conventions, from Seattle to D.C. to Philadelphia
to L.A. or to next fall in Prague, when the IMF reconvenes. Militant
shutdowns cannot be the strategic goal. They are, instead, fertile
propaganda-by-the-deed that interrupts official narrative and re-focuses
attention on alternatives. But those alternatives have to be clearly drawn
and presented.

In that sense, some of the questions raised after Seattle, and now in the
wake of A 16, are improperly framed. It's not so much where we go from
here. Because the answer should be political and strategic, not
geographical, the question should, instead, be what do we do now?
How? And, most importantly, with whom? Our goal is not to feel good
or indulge in mere self-affirmation -- but to win tangible victories.

It was in that precise context that I had a memorable discussion with
Mike Dolan, field director of the Citizens Trade Campaign. As one of the
chief organizers of the Battle in Seattle, Dolan concentrated his efforts
this week almost exclusively on A 12, the day of labor-backed lobbying
against the free-trade pact with China. We chatted outside the Calvary
Methodist Church on the night of A 16 as the activists inside charted
their plans for the second morning of direct action. I asked Dolan where
he would be during that next morning's street protests.

"I will not be participating in Monday's protests," he answered pointedly.
"I have to go back to my real work of confronting the corporate elite on
the most important and strategic trade vote still pending before this
Congress -- the China vote. That's a real victory we're about to score for
this movement, and I can as much as taste it."

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