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“Make the global economy work! Stop corporate greed!” read the banner being carried down K Street in downtown Washington. A few minutes later, police in riot gear fired several canisters of tear gas to keep the protesters from getting any closer to the White House. When the crowd refused to disperse, armored personnel carriers moved in, and police handcuffed dozens of youthful demonstrators and carted them off to jail in yellow school buses.
The confrontation was one of many between demonstrators and law-enforcement officers that engulfed the capital for two days in mid-April. The catalyst was the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the global institutions that oversee exchange rates and provide economic assistance to developing countries, respectively. The same rallying cries had been heard at the violent pro-tests in Seattle during a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) last November.
“The WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are the main institutions that promote corporate greed,” Drea, a young woman who had traveled from Montana for the April demonstration, told a reporter. “What's bringing all these people together is the recognition that globalization is just another way to allow multinational companies to exploit people all over the world. We can't just ignore what's happening and let them do it.”
Washington hadn't seen such an outpouring of youthful outrage since the late 1960s, when antiwar demonstrators took to the streets. But the anti-globalization forces also seem to include a broader cross-section of the American public. Marching alongside the students were a number of veterans of earlier protests -- middle-aged men and women with more than a few gray hairs. A group of elderly ladies wearing plastic rain kerchiefs said they had come from California to march and ask their congresswoman to vote against trade agreements that cost Americans jobs and gut U.S. environmental-protection laws.
But the biggest difference between the antiwar protests and the demonstrations against globalization may be the active participation by labor unions. In the 1960s, student protesters clashed not only with police but also with “hard hats,” blue-collar workers who denounced the protesters as unpatriotic slackers.
“There's a new coalition today,” says David Smith, director of policy at the AFL-CIO. “In both Seattle and Washington we saw young people, environmentalists and folks from the religious community marching together with trade unionists. This is a powerful and growing popular coalition.”
Free-trade advocates wasted no time in dismissing the demonstrators as extremist kooks. A Wall Street Journal editorial described the Washington protesters as “this seeming circus -- a smorgasbord of save-the-turtles activists, anarchists, egalitarians, Luddites and Marxists.” “”
To Smith, such statements amount to little more than whistling past the graveyard. “I take some of the venom of our critics as a sign that we're on the right track,” he says.
Indeed, says Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, multinational corporations will face even greater opposition in the future if they continue to ignore calls to protect the environment and workers' rights.
“The huge demonstrations in Seattle and Washington provided a clear signal to the international globalization institutions that if they keep trying to do business as usual they're going to encounter an ever-growing storm of protest,” he says. “People are not going to stand by and see their communities and their quality of life degraded by distant corporate powers. I certainly hope they get the message, because if things don't change I would predict that this is just the initial blip on the radar screen of a growing tidal wave.”
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