North Carolina Society for Ethical Culture
The Ethics of Globalism and Civil Disobedience--Protesting the IMF in
Washington, April 2000. Sunday platform for the North Carolina Society
for Ethical Culture, May 28, 2000
by Kate Lovelady
Copyright 2000 by Kate Lovelady
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. This
is my first speech since 8th grade, and it was a much more difficult one
to write, I admit.
This past April I was arrested along with hundreds of people who had gone
to Washington D.C. to take part in the protests against the International
Monetary Fund (or IMF) and the World Bank. These protests were a
follow-up to what the media called The Battle in Seattle, protests
against the World Trade Organization (or WTO) that occurred last fall.
This morning I'm going to try to explain what the World Bank, IMF, and
WTO do, what those of us protesting against these organizations are
trying to accomplish, and my personal story of what happened in
Washington. This is a lot to cover in half an hour, so I hope you will
consider my remarks as merely an introduction to issues we all need to
learn and talk more about.
The IMF, World Bank, and the WTO are international organizations that to
a large degree set the rules for the global economy. Each of the three
has a different role, and I've prepared a cheat sheet to keep some of
these issues clear. I do not have a degree in economics, but I have read
and continue to read a lot about these issues. Economics is far too vital
to abandon to so-called experts. The CEOs and national leaders who make
the global economic decisions often have a less-than-profound
understanding of economics, and yet they feel free to hold opinions and
to act on them. I believe everyone is entitled to do the same,
particularly as the everyday actions of organizations such as the WTO and
the World Bank directly affect average people everyday.
The WTO (World Trade Organization) is the easiest to explain, and it is
easiest to understand its importance and why it has inspired such
protest. The WTO was created in 1995 to enforce and extend GATT, which
stands for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, an international
trade treaty. The WTO, which has over 150 member countries, I believe, is
essentially a court that rules on trade disputes. The WTO decides whether
a country's policies or regulations are a "barrier to trade." So-called
trade barriers can include tariffs, which are fees and regulations that
governments make to keep out products they don't like or to protect a
domestic industry from foreign competition, but the WTO also considers
rules about information and advertising as trade barriers.
Here are two quick examples of WTO decisions:
1. The US had environmental laws that banned the importation of gasoline
that didn't meet certain purity standards. Venezuela wanted to sell the
US gasoline that didn't meet these requirements, so it went to the WTO.
The WTO ruled against the US, so in 1996 the Clinton administration
rewrote part of the US Clean Air Act and lowered purity standards of
gasoline in the US, thereby allowing increased pollution in our air.
2. Guatemala did not allow baby-formula advertisers to state or imply
that infant formula is as healthy or healthier for babies than breast
milk. Encouraging breast-feeding is especially important in countries
without the clean water and education necessary to use formula correctly.
Formula manufacturers, through Switzerland, went to the WTO, and the WTO
ruled against Guatemala. Thanks to the power of unfettered advertising,
Guatemala's infant mortality rate will undoubtedly increase.
Well, okay, you might say, so the WTO made a couple dubious-sounding
decisions; no organization is perfect. Trade in general is good for both
parties, and a third-party organization to objectively decide trade
disputes--a UN of trade--seems like a great idea. The problem is that the
WTO is not like the UN. Its meetings are closed, its ruling bodies are
made up of corporate representatives, outside groups are not allowed to
present facts or arguments, and there are no outside appeals. The WTO,
reflecting its membership, has so far ruled against every single public
health, safety, or environmental regulation that has been challenged
before it, finding them all "barriers to trade."
The WTO as it is presently set up is obviously designed not to promote
fair trade, but to demolish all tariffs and regulations. In effect, the
WTO is ensuring that its member governments no longer have control over
what can be sold in their countries, or even how products are labeled and
marketed.
Why so many disparate groups protested the WTO in Seattle was that the
reach of the WTO is so immense. If you are concerned about sweatshop
labor, endangered species, health, food additives, etc., etc., etc., the
WTO can rule against any regulations you might manage to get passed. And
you may not even know that your hard-fought-for rules have been
overturned, as WTO decisions are rarely given much coverage in the
corporate press. For example, most environmentalists aren't aware that
"dolphin-safe" tuna laws in the US have been ruled a "barrier to trade"
by the WTO, and they have been rewritten in a substantially weakened form
as a result.
Next, the IMF and the World Bank. I'm going to discuss them together for
simplicity's sake. They were created in the 40s and both give loans to
governments. The World Bank mostly funds long-term development projects,
while the IMF provides short-term loans to governments in debt or
currency crises, like many Asian countries were a year or so ago. It's
important to keep in mind that because voting in the World Bank and the
IMF is determined by how much money each country contributes to them, the
US has something like 17% of the vote by itself, so when we talk about
World Bank and IMF policies we're talking largely about US policies. Now,
giving loans to governments in trouble or funding projects a country
itself is too poor to fund are in principle good things. The problem is
again in the details. The two main criticisms are: what projects are
being funded, and what governments are required to do to qualify for
these loans. The bulk of World Bank money goes to big projects: dams,
irrigation systems, agribusiness. In India, an estimated one million
people stand to be dislocated by a World Bank-funded dam project, and
protests have been going on at the proposed dam site for over a year.
These projects usually do little to help the average poor citizen, and in
fact, they often end up hurting the very people they are supposed to
help. How often? According to the World Bank itself, over 60% of its
projects are failures.
Now remember that these projects, such as a proposed 600-mile oil
pipeline in Chad that will cause ecological devastation, will benefit
primarily multinational corporations, such as dam-builders and
international oil companies, but they are being paid for with loans. Who
will be responsible for paying back these loans? The dislocated people of
India and the oil-soaked folk of Chad. If it helps you relate, you might
think of these projects as global sports arena-building scams, in which
public taxes pay for a few short-term jobs, but mostly for large private
profits.
Now for the IMF. To qualify for a loan from the IMF, a government is
required to undertake certain "Structural adjustments." These usually
include slashing domestic spending--health, education, welfare. In
countries that are already poor this can have deadly effects. The country
is often required to switch from subsistence to export-oriented farming
and to deregulate labor markets, to weaken environmental laws, to abolish
subsidies (on things such as heating oil and food staples), and to
privatize industries. We believe in the US that private industry is in
the long run better for consumers, but as is obvious from the example of
the Soviet Union, too much privatization too quickly can be disastrous.
The US itself continues to subsidize domestic industries such as
agriculture and the Internet. These criticisms are not merely academic.
While we were protesting the World Bank in D.C., in Brazil there were
massive protests against the recent privatization of their water system
and the subsequent soaring of their water bills. Several Brazilians were
killed by government soldiers during those protests.
Overall, the policies of the World Bank and the IMF lead to the rich
getting richer and the poor poorer, small farmers losing their land, wage
decreases, economic devastation, and crushing debt. These criticisms are
not coming only from progressives, either, but by some surprising
sources. A former head economist for the World Bank has accused the IMF
of bailing out extremely wealthy currency speculators at cost of local
jobs. The president of the World Bank has implied that IMF structural
adjustment programs are insensitive to the needs of the poor. The IMF, in
turn, criticized the World Bank for making loans to Russia that could be
used in Russia's military campaign against the revolution in Chechnya. A
commission of our Republican Congress recently released a scathing report
on the IMF and World Bank that among other things accused the
institutions of subverting democracy in the borrowing countries and
advised that their activities be drastically cut back.
***
So that is a very brief overview of some of the reasons I went to
Washington to protest the IMF and World Bank meetings, along with over a
hundred other Triangle residents, a trip that began when I boarded a bus
at The Carolina Inn at 6am on Sat. April 15th. When we arrived in
Washington we were supposed to go to a place called the Convergence
Center to meet up, sign in our groups, and decide what part we wanted to
take in the protests--there were puppet groups, civil disobedience
groups, medical aid groups in case the police used pepper spray or tear
gas, etc. Upon getting to DC, however, we learned that the police had had
the fire department shut down the convergence center, and that the police
had confiscated food, medical supplies, and even informational pamphlets.
The police claimed to have found a Molotov cocktail at the center, which
they latter amended to the makings of a Molotov cocktail, which they
still later amended to a bottle of vinegar and a handkerchief. I was
truly surprised that the police would raid and shut down the center, as I
thought they would prefer an organized protest with registered groups to
a confused free-for-all, but I was to be surprised a lot more by police
decisions and actions that weekend.
Being at loose ends without a Convergence Center, I decided with some
friends to attend a rally in front of the Dept. of Justice to protest the
"prison-industrial complex." Many of the issues concerning our prison
system, such as its abuse of poor and minority populations for profit,
naturally concern many of the same people who came to protest the World
Bank. At the Dept. of Justice we joined a crowd of maybe 100 people in
listening to various speakers. After maybe half an hour, the whole group
set off on a march. With police on mini-bikes shepherding us across
crosswalks and keeping us out of the street, we marched along the
sidewalks of DC for the next 45 minutes or so. We chanted, folks beat
drums, three women in fabulous red dresses and giant red flags posed for
pictures with the Communist Manifesto. . . . It was a spirited, lively
march; people waved at us from stores and cars, and several hundred more
people joined us along the way.
The first hint that things weren't quite right is that our route was very
haphazard; at one point we actually stopped in the middle of a street and
went back the way we came. My friends and I were getting tired, and we
had decided to find our way back to the youth hostel, when we stopped
again, in the middle of a rather desolate downtown block. A line of
police were blocking the whole street. Since there was now no traffic we
filled the street and chanted and beat drums a little more, annoyed that
the police apparently wanted to hide us from the tourists. It was around
5pm now and people were getting tired, so the crowd quieted down and
began to drift apart. At this point the situation got very strange. There
were now lines of police in helmets with their clubs (I mean, batons) out
blocking both ends of the street. When approached by people trying to
leave the block the police only shook their heads silently. And that was
it, for the next 45 minutes. We couldn't leave, but no one would talk to
us. We hadn't been told to disperse or told we were doing anything wrong,
and in fact the organizers were now repeatedly asking the police to allow
us to leave in small groups. There's no answer. It's getting dark and
starting to rain. The organizers start calling out legal council phone
numbers that kids are writing on their arms in magic marker. I put my
handkerchief down on the sidewalk, not wanting to be charged with
carrying the makings of a Molotov cocktail, and then decide that's
ridiculous and pick it back up.
There are many people younger than me there, some shivering in the rain,
a few crying, some defiantly dancing to drums. A lot of us realize it's
been a long time since we've been to a bathroom. Next there is an
announcement that the police would like all the media to leave.
Thankfully, many of the reporters and photographers decide to stay with
us. On the second floor of an office building a woman presses a note to
the window that says "The Whole World Is Watching." For some reason that
scared the hell out of me, though I'm sure that was not her intent. Now
the lines of police start chanting and jogging forward, thrusting their
clubs in front, compressing the crowd. It's almost like a step dance and
probably pretty funny if they aren't moving toward you. Then I see the
first people led off with their hands cuffed behind them--a young woman
and a middle-aged man with a camera bag slung in front of him, probably
one of the journalists who chose to stay. They're lead off toward a long
row of school buses. It occurs to me that if we wait our turn it will be
hours before we get off this wet, cold sidewalk, not to mention get to
use a bathroom, so I walk up to the front of the line and turn around and
present my wrists. A policewoman handcuffs me, pats me down, and turns my
pockets inside out and shakes them vigorously. Once she's done de-linting
me I'm led to a bus.
>From that point it became increasingly tedious. In summary, I sat on a
bus with 20 other protestors, hands in plastic cuffs behind our backs,
from approximately 6:30 pm until approximately 3:30 am. I did get
escorted to a toilet finally, around 1am. The police were mostly very
grumpy at having to stay up all night with us. Several of them were
compulsively computing their overtime pay the whole night. Eventually I
was photographed, fingerprinted, all my things including, yes, my
shoelaces, were taken, I was rehandcuffed right wrist to left ankle, and
placed in a large cell with maybe 20 other female protestors. I was never
told I was under arrest, or read my rights, though I've heard they don't
have to do that in D.C. I wasn't told anything about the charges or the
process by the police, who apparently expected us to know what was going
on by word-of-mouth. I was told that if I didn't give them $50 I wouldn't
get out until at least Sunday afternoon and would have to come back to DC
for a hearing, and that if I was arrested again at the big Sunday rally
they couldn't say how long I'd be in jail. When asked why anyone would be
arrested for attending the definitely permitted Sunday rally, the police
merely shrugged.
By 7am Sunday I had gotten $50, signed a piece of paper I frankly didn't
read, and been released. Forgoing sleep, we went to the permitted Sunday
rally, from which wild wolves now would not keep me away. Ralph Nader and
other national and international activists spoke against the policies and
the record of the World Bank and the IMF, and tens of thousands of people
attended and marched. It was entirely peaceful, and there were no arrests
that I saw.
Meanwhile, however, there were still many folks from my arrest group in
jail, any many, particularly those who knew more about their rights than
I did and who were demanding court hearings, were being threatened,
slapped, and shoved into bars. There were also many clashes going on
between police and protestors who were trying to keep delegates from the
IMF headquarters. Some of those protestors were peacefully lying chained
in the streets, while some were building barricades out of garbage cans,
but I've heard or read no accounts of property damage. As they did in
Seattle, the police were ignoring or avoiding the most militant of these
groups, while assaulting and occasionally arresting smaller, peaceful
groups. I still don't understand if these are tactics of some kind, or if
the police aren't in good enough shape to chase anyone who runs away. In
any case, the Associate Press photographer who suffered a severe head
injury after being clubbed by the police is an example of the kind of
nonviolent people who were getting hurt. Other verified injuries
inflicted by police that weekend include a man whose ribs were broken,
hands and feet trampled by police horses, a woman whose nose was broken,
dislocated shoulders, lacerations, and numerous pepper-spray and tear-gas
injuries reported by emergency rooms.
But I want to talk a little more generally about that mass arrest of 678
people, a group that the police admit included shoppers, passers-by, and
press as well as marchers. Some of the arrestees were detained in
handcuffs for as long as 24 hours. What were we charged with? "Marching
without a Permit." Now, it can be argued that even this charge is false,
as the organizers of the march had verbal permission from the police to
march. I have also heard that it is not necessary to obtain a permit to
have a sidewalk march in the District of
Columbia. We weren't charged with blocking traffic, disturbing the peace,
inciting a riot, etc., because we didn't do any of these things. What
exactly, then, does "parading without a permit" mean? I think it means
Shut Up--or as MLK wrote so much more eloquently from Birmingham jail,
"sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For
instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit.
Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a
permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used
to . . . deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly
and protest."
D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams described the mass arrests as "proactive,
precautionary, and preventive." I am not a legal scholar any more than an
economist, but to me "preventive detention" sounds rather
unconstitutional. Didn't the US government shell out millions of dollars
a few years ago to Japanese Americans who were "preventatively detained"
during World War II? My 14 hours in jail with stale donuts is hardly
comparable to being hosed by the Birmingham police, or being shipped to a
relocation camp in Arizona, or the daily abuses of the police against
minorities. But the arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors--1,300
people in total were arrested over that April weekend--should be a
wake-up call for even the most jaded American. In 2000 this country still
arrests people not for what they've done but for who they are. I've read
that the April 15 sweep was one of the largest political mass arrests in
recent U.S. history. It will not be the last unless we say, loudly, A
democracy does not treat its citizens this way.
So what were the media saying about the protests, about the arrests and
the police violence? The coverage will hardly surprise anyone here who
understands who owns the mainstream media in the US.
The Wall Street Journal called us "global village idiots"; Newsweek
suggested we were ex-Deadheads with nothing better to do; the NY Times
ran three op-eds against us and none for. Time magazine did have a
surprisingly well-researched article that explained the different
criticisms against the World Bank and WTO, and there was more balanced
coverage in some other national press, which reinforced my belief that
there are people of goodwill everywhere, even in Fortune Magazine. But
overall, the corporate media were downright vicious in their depictions
of the protests, even though many of the same criticisms of the World
Bank, IMF, and WTO have been voiced by very mainstream and "important"
figures. Economist Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, hardly a village idiot, gave
a speech to the World Bank a few days after the protests in which he
stated that "The current situation condemns hundreds of millions of
people to unnecessary suffering and millions to premature death, and [the
World Bank and IMF] are parties to the disaster."
Why do the protestors make those in power so angry?
Because we are in the streets, waving signs, dressed as endangered
species or as prison laborers, lying in front of traffic, yelling as loud
as we can. This is messy, often silly, usually inconvenient. But unlike
Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard we are not invited to address the World Bank.
But neither can World Bank employees forget us as easily as they might
one hour of listening to a polite talk by Jeffrey Sachs, as we are
hoisting giant puppets outside their windows and jamming their fax
machines. It is messy; it is rude; it is unfair that innocent World Bank
workers cannot go to lunch without getting yelled at. But I believe that
even if we could wait for Jeffrey Sachs to change the World Bank, we
should not. To quote MLK again, "Lamentably, it is an historical fact
that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust
posture, but . . . groups tend to be more immoral than individuals."
There is enormous inertia in institutions that only an equal force can
move, the force of a movement, not simply quiet discourse.
And despite well-reasoned criticism by congressional commissions and
Harvard economists, I don't believe that we can wait for change to come
through the proper channels. Because many important people still think
the World Bank and the IMF are doing fine. After all, the primary reason
to lend money is to make more money back from interest payments. As long
as these countries can continue to make their loan payments, the effects
of the actual programs are irrelevant. Using similar logic, an internal
World Bank memo argued quite sensibly that locating toxic industries in
poor countries is economically efficient. Poor sick and dead workers are
less of a drag on the global economy than middle-class sick and dead
workers. I don't believe that you can win rational arguments with people
who have forgotten that the role of economies is to support the health
and happiness of people--that it is not the role of people to make
economic systems work better. I will take "idiots" in turtle suits over
that kind of logic any day. In fact, I think the use of "village idiot"
is actually inspired, because it is the role of the fool to speak the
truth to the rulers, to tell them that they're wearing no clothes. To
point out that statements such as "bad jobs at bad wages are better than
no jobs at no wages" or "the economy requires 4.5% unemployment" are
merely the same false choices given in the past to defend slave labor,
child labor, sweatshop labor. I would rather stand with those who want to
substitute "foolish" ideas such as Better and better jobs at better and
better wages, starting with at least a little better Right Now.
In his book Soul of a Citizen, Paul Loeb talks about the trap of the
perfect standard that keeps people from acting against injustice, because
they never feel they have enough information or understanding, because
they might harbor some hypocrisy in their lives. But, he says, "Social
change always proceeds one way or another in the absence of absolute
knowledge, as long as people are willing to follow their convictions, to
act despite their doubts, and to speak even at the risk of making
mistakes. As the philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, 'If
you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.'"
I believe, however, despite the complex economic defenses, that the
violence of the reaction to the protests illustrates not disgust or
intellectual disagreement so much as fear. Fear on the part of the
individual people who make up these entities we call "corporations," "the
mainstream," etc. As we become a more unequal society, a more unequal
world, we who are privileged become ever more fearful of losing our
privileges, more afraid of change, more afraid of those who want what we
have. Continuing our way of life as it is right here, right now, requires
that others be paid low wages, that others live next to our landfills,
that others have their homes swept away by floods because of logging and
mining; it requires that others not have what we have, because the planet
simply won't support it using today's technology. And it is natural to be
afraid of change, to have difficulty empathizing with people you don't
know about and will probably never meet. Acknowledging these feelings is
a necessary step in working to rise above them, to educate ourselves and
others, to learn to empathize with strangers, to consider the state of
the planet beyond our individual lives. I like to think that human beings
are not done evolving, but the next step in evolution, I hope, is not the
top 2% of the world's population living to 120 years old or having data
chips inserted in our bodies. I hope the next stage is social evolution,
that we will develop the empathy necessary to create a more just and
equal world. Once we've done that, if everyone wants chips in their
bodies, fine.
The good thing about these global corporate bad guys is that they are
helping create a new kind of international activism, one that crosses far
more barriers of issue, class, and nationality than ever before. It was
argued that the WTO protests were primarily about domestic issues--how
labor, environmental, and other laws in the US could be affected, how the
rest of the world might "drag us down." But the World Bank and IMF do not
directly hurt Americans, and in fact their policies make money for the
US. And yet the global coalitions that were created to protest the WTO
allowed the first-world activists to hear the third-world activists, to
take on their issues, to see, to give the last word to Martin Luther
King, "the interrelatedness of all communities and states," and that
"injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Copyright 2000 by Kate Lovelady
Last Modified: Sunday, October 23, 2005
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