Fences and Windows (3 page)

December 1999

“Who are these people?” That is the question being asked across the United States this week, on radio call-in shows, on editorial pages and, most of all, in the hallways of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

Until very recently, trade negotiations were genteel, experts-only affairs. There weren’t protesters outside, let alone protesters dressed as giant sea turtles. But this week’s WTO meeting is anything but genteel: a state of emergency has been declared in Seattle, the streets look like a war zone and the negotiations have collapsed.

There are plenty of theories floating around about the mysterious identities of the fifty thousand activists in Seattle. Some claim they are wannabe radicals with sixties envy. Or anarchists bent only on destruction. Or Luddites fighting against a tide of globalization that has already swamped them. Michael Moore, the director of the WTO, describes his opponents as nothing more than selfish protectionists determined to hurt the world’s poor.

Some confusion about the protesters’ political goals is understandable. This is the first political movement born of the chaotic pathways of the Internet. Within its ranks, there is no top-down hierarchy ready to explain the master plan, no universally recognized leaders giving easy sound
bites, and nobody knows what is going to happen next.

But one thing is certain: the protesters in Seattle are not anti-globalization; they have been bitten by the globalization bug as surely as the trade lawyers inside the official meetings. Rather, if this new movement is “anti” anything, it is anti-corporate, opposing the logic that what’s good for business—less regulation, more mobility, more access—will trickle down into good news for everybody else.

The movement’s roots are in campaigns that challenge this logic by focusing on the dismal human rights, labour and ecological records of a handful of multinational companies. Many of the young people on the streets of Seattle this week cut their activist teeth campaigning against Nike’s sweatshops, or Royal Dutch/Shell’s human rights record in the Niger Delta, or Monsanto’s re-engineering of the global food supply. Over the past three years, these individual corporations have become symbols of the failings of the global economy, ultimately providing activists with name-brand entry points to the arcane world of the WTO.

By focusing on global corporations and their impact around the world, this activist network is fast becoming the most internationally minded, globally linked movement ever seen. There are no more faceless Mexicans or Chinese workers stealing “our” jobs, in part because those workers’ representatives are now on the same e-mail lists and at the same conferences as the Western activists, and many even travelled to Seattle to join the demonstrations this week. When protesters shout about the evils of globalization, most are not calling for a return to narrow nationalism but for the
borders of globalization to be expanded, for trade to be linked to labour rights, environmental protection and democracy.

This is what sets the young protesters in Seattle apart from their sixties predecessors. In the age of Woodstock, refusing to play by state and school rules was regarded as a political act in itself. Now, opponents of the WTO—even many who call themselves anarchists—are outraged about a
lack
of rules being applied to corporations, as well as the flagrant double standards in the application of existing rules in rich or poor countries.

They came to Seattle because they found out that WTO tribunals were overturning environmental laws protecting endangered species because the laws, apparently, were unfair trade barriers. Or they learned that France’s decision to ban hormone-laced beef was deemed by the WTO to be unacceptable interference with the free market. What is on trial in Seattle is not trade or globalization but the global attack on the right of citizens to set rules that protect people and the planet.

Everyone, of course, claims to be all for rules, from President Clinton to Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates. In an odd turn of events, the need for “rules-based trade” has become the mantra of the era of deregulation. But the WTO has consistently sought to sever trade, quite unnaturally, from everything and everyone affected by it: workers, the environment, culture. This is why President Clinton’s suggestion yesterday that the rift between the protesters and the delegates can be smoothed over with small compromises and consultation is so misguided.

The faceoff is not between globalizers and protectionists but between two radically different visions of globalization. One has had a monopoly for the past ten years. The other just had its coming-out party.

April 2000

My friend Mez is getting on a bus to Washington, D.C., on Saturday. I asked him why. He said with great intensity, “Look, I missed Seattle. There’s no way I’m missing Washington.”

I’d heard people speak with that kind of unrestrained longing before, but the object of their affection was usually a muddy music festival or a short-run New York play like
The Vagina Monologues
. I’ve never heard anyone talk that way about a political protest. Especially not a protest against groaner bureaucracies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And certainly not when they are being called on the carpet for nothing sexier than a decades-old loan policy called “structural adjustment.”

And yet there they are: university students and artists and wage-free anarchists and lunch-box steelworkers, piling onto buses from all corners of the continent. Stuffed in their pockets and shoulder bags are fact sheets about the ratio of spending on health care to debt repayment in Mozambique (two and a half times more for debt) and the number of people worldwide living without electricity (two billion).

Four months ago, this same coalition of environmental, labour and anarchist groups brought a World Trade Organization
meeting to a standstill. In Seattle, an impressive range of single-issue campaigns—some focused on controversial corporations such as Nike or Shell, some on dictatorships such as Burma—broadened their focus to a more structural critique of the regulatory bodies playing referee in a global race to the bottom.

Caught off guard by the strength and organization of the opposition, the proponents of accelerated free trade immediately went on the offensive, attacking the protesters as enemies of the poor. Most memorably,
The Economist
put a picture of a starving Indian child on its cover and claimed that this was who was really being hurt by the protests. WTO chief Michael Moore got all choked up: “To those who would argue that we should stop our work, I say: Tell that to the poor, to the marginalized around the world who are looking to us to help them.”

The recasting of the WTO, and of global capitalism itself, as a tragically misunderstood poverty elimination program is the single most off-putting legacy of the Battle in Seattle. To hear the line coming out of Geneva, barrier-free trade is a giant philanthropic plan, and multinational corporations are using their soaring shareholder returns and executive salaries only to disguise their real intentions: to heal the world’s sick, to raise the minimum wage and to save the trees.

But nothing does a better job of giving the lie to this specious equation of humanitarian goals with deregulated trade than the track record of the World Bank and the IMF, who have exacerbated world poverty with a zealous and near-mystical faith in trickle-down economics.

The World Bank has lent money to the poorest and most desperate nations to build economies based on foreign-owned megaprojects, cash-crop farming, low-wage export-driven manufacturing and speculative finance. These projects have been a boon to multinational mining, textile, and agribusiness companies around the world, but in many countries they have also led to environmental devastation, mass migration to urban centres, currency crashes and dead-end sweatshop jobs.

Which is where the World Bank and IMF come in with their infamous bailouts, always with more conditions attached. In Haiti, it was a frozen minimum wage, in Thailand the elimination of restrictions on foreign ownership, in Mexico a hike in university fees was urged. And when these latest austerity measures fail once again to lead to sustainable economic growth, these countries are still on the hook for their layers of debts.

As international attention turns to the World Bank and IMF this weekend, it will go a long way toward countering the argument that the protesters in Seattle were greedy North American protectionists, determined to keep the fruits of the economic boom to themselves. When union members and environmentalists took to the streets to complain about WTO interference in environmental and labour regulation, they weren’t trying to impose “our” standards on the developing world. They were playing catch-up with a movement for self-determination that began in the southern nations of the world, where the words “World Bank” are spat, not said, and where “IMF” is parodied on protest signs as short for “I M Fired.”

After Seattle, it was relatively easy for the World Trade Organization to win the spin wars. So few people had even heard of the WTO before the protests that the organization’s claims were left mostly unchallenged. But the World Bank and the IMF are a different story: prod them even a little bit and all the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet. Usually the skeletons can only be seen in poor countries— crumbling schools and hospitals, farmers thrown off their land, overcrowded cities, toxic water systems. But this weekend all that changes; the skeletons are following the bankers home to head office, in Washington, D.C.

Okay, I admit it: I slept in.

I went to Washington for the protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but when my cellphone rang at some ungodly hour with word that the new plan was to meet at 4
A.M.
on Monday, I just couldn’t do it.

“Okay, meet you there,” I mumbled, scribbling street intersections with a pen that had run out of ink. There was absolutely no way. Bone-tired after thirteen hours on the streets the day before, I decided to catch up with the demos at a more civilized hour. And so, it seems, did a few thousand other people, allowing the World Bank delegates, bussed in before dawn, to get to their meeting in bleary-eyed peace.

“A defeat!” many of the newspapers pronounced, eager to put this outbreak of messy democracy behind them.

Canadian-expat-in-Washington David Frum couldn’t get to his computer fast enough, declaring the protests “a flop,” “a disaster” and, for good measure, “a flat soufflé.” In Frum’s estimation, the activists were so discouraged by their inability to shut down the IMF meeting on Sunday that they took to their beds the next day rather than brave the rainy streets.

It’s true it was tough to drag butt out of bed on Monday, but not because of the rain or the cops. It was tough because by then so much had already been accomplished in a single week of protests. Shutting down a meeting is good activist bragging rights, no doubt, but the real victories happen around those dramatic moments.

The first sign of victory came in the weeks before the protest, with a rush among former World Bank and IMF officials to come out on the side of the critics and renounce their former employers. Most notably, former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz said the IMF was in desperate need of a large dose of democracy and transparency.

Next, a corporation gave in. The protest organizers had announced that they would take their calls for “fair trade” as opposed to “free trade” to the doorstep of the Starbucks coffee chain, demanding that it sell coffee grown by farmers who are paid a living wage. Last week, only four days before the planned protest, Starbucks announced it would carry a line of fair-trade-certified coffee—not an earth-shattering victory but a sign of the times at least.

And, finally, the protesters defined the terms of debate. Before the giant papier-mâché puppets were dry, the failures of many World Bank-financed megaprojects and IMF
bailouts were outlined in newspapers and radio talk shows. More than that, the critique of “capitalism” just saw a comeback of Santana-like proportions.

The radical anarchist contingent the Black Bloc renamed itself the Anti-Capitalist Bloc. College students wrote in chalk on the sidewalks: “If you think the IMF and World Bank are scary, wait until you hear about Capitalism.” The frat boys at American University responded with their own slogans, written on placards and hung in their windows: “Capitalism brought you prosperity. Embrace it!” Even the Sunday pundits on CNN started saying the word “capitalism” instead of just “the economy.” And the word makes not one but two appearances on the cover of yesterday’s
New York Times
. After more than a decade of unchecked triumphalism, capitalism (as opposed to euphemisms such as “globalization,” “corporate rule” or “the growing gap between rich and poor”) has re-emerged as a legitimate subject of public debate. This kind of impact is so significant that it makes the disruption of a routine World Bank meeting seem almost beside the point. The agenda of the World Bank meeting, and the press conference that followed, was hijacked utterly. The usual talk of deregulation, privatization and the need to “discipline” Third World markets was supplanted by commitments to speed up debt relief for impoverished nations and spend “unlimited” sums on the African AIDS crisis.

Of course, this is only the beginning of a long process. But if there is a lesson of Washington, it is that a barricade can be stormed in spirit, as well as in body. Monday’s sleep-in
wasn’t the nap of the defeated, it was the well-deserved rest of the victorious.

July 2000

“This conference is not like other conferences.”

That’s what all the speakers at “Re-Imagining Politics and Society” were told before we arrived at New York’s Riverside Church. When we addressed the delegates (there were about a thousand over three days in May), we were to try to solve a very specific problem: the lack of “unity of vision and strategy” guiding the movement against global corporatism.