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May 1 Minneapolis Writings + Reflections |
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click below and go >> Reflections >> My Reflections >> Boom for Whom >> |
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Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were both rights violated on Monday, May 1 in downtown Minneapolis. We went downtown to present the real issues: the police are protecting the corporate state not the people. What does that mean? It means that CEO's now are making up to and more than 400 times more than their average worker: exploiting the people, who are the heart and soul of America. The workers in the HERE #17 rally at the Hilton Hotel represented that exploitation. While the economy supposedly soars, has never been better, etc., all through the 1990s, the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. The corporations are trying to destroy our food supply with seeds that create plants that don't produce more seeds (terminator plants), with cancer-producing irradiation of meat, with genetically modified foods that include not just modified plant life, but adding genes from other species. The list is much longer: saving our oceans, our water, saving the earth, as people came together in Seattle to do, as people came together in Washington to do. "Agri-Culture, not Agri-Business" was one of many signs in the parade. The excruciating pain of people who are committed to nonviolence as a way of life: if the police were just doing their job, as Chief Olson told Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Jane McDonald, they were not serving the people, or rather only one small segment, corporate America. "To protect and serve" used to be their motto. No longer. Jane McDonald said, "I feel rageful, grief-stricken. We did not want a Seattle or Washington D.C. in Minneapolis. Take the example of the young man, Tony Basta, who was shot down in streets of St. Paul, a random action of violence . . . shot riding his bike. Yet the same random violence is exhibited by the police. The police force has been militarized beyond recognition, whether the Minneapolis Police or the Highway Patrol, who were also present on the streets that day. They have become a military force, not a police force. Now we have the professionalization of police violence, protecting the status quo." It is no accident that protests involving thousands of people took place worldwide on MayDay2000. People around the world understand that their rights as workers are being taken away (or they have not had them in the first place), and their environment is being destroyed. They also understand, having tried legal means through the courts, that there is no way left but to take to the streets. Having our presence in downtown Minneapolis was so very important, not just for us, but for the many people/workers who observed. Such comments were heard as "This is great, how did you find out about this?" Or the information on Affordable Housing passed along to some women "suits." Or the men "suits" with ties who watched from the safe section at 2nd Avenue and 6th Street, where the main melee occurred. Interaction, talk, discussion, the most civilized thing to do: It's very clear that disruption of business as usual is not acceptable, nor is getting our message out to people who work downtown. The police serve the corporate interests only. They are the military arm of the corporations in Minneapolis as NATO is the military arm of U.S. corporate interests in Europe. What is the job of the police? To unnecessarily beat up nonviolent protestors? In London, the windows of a McDonalds were broken. In Berlin, counter-demonstrators added to the fray. But in Minneapolis, the "protest" and "protestors," the people celebrating May Day with a parade, a union rally, and a party in their city, were nonviolent except for a few expletives, were a coalition of all ages, including many high-school agers, women with babies, and "gray hairs." Heart of the Beast lent its inimitable pageantry to the parade with a dove puppet and one of The Wild Horses of Peace. The Chicks on Sticks strode high above us as we walked down Marquette--a suitable choice since Marquette is the "Wall Street" of Minneapolis. Then some of the young people decided to set up their band to have a party at Hennepin and 6th Street. The arrests of young people started then, and continued to the next corner where they linked arms to hold the street. Throughout the day the arrests appeared to be random-picking people out of the crown for no apparent reason-except for a few known targets, such as Bear of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who was doing security and Bob Greenberg of pie-throwing fame. The arrests also were far more violent than necessary, with reports of police standing on people's heads, of using their crowd-control batons to hit people, of putting the plastic handcuffs on so tight they cut off circulation. Finally, they arrested people who were providing support for those already in jail, and who were not blocking any streets, who were "legal" as a clear infringement of First Amendment Rights. The City of Minneapolis, in the guise of the Minneapolis Police with the help of the Highway Patrol, declared a military state. And the young people knew as they walked to Loring Park chanting, "this is what a police state looks like." The content of these comments was formed in part by the Alliant Techsystem Vigilers on Wednesday, May 3, 2000. And here is a quote from London, from a press statement by RTS people who did the Guerrilla Gardening at Parliament. "What happened with the police and the press is quite simple. The collective intelligence of a hierarchical organization falls rather sharply as its size increases. So it can do nothing but trundle the tracks of a pre-ordained plan. Both the police and the press were left, as so often happens, playing out the plann for a disaster that wasn't in fact happening. They repressed and they reported the lies that they'd hyped in advance, not what happened." |
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May Day in downtown Minneapolis was awesome today, hundreds of people marching through the streets. After a short rally in Peavey Plaza with speeches by Clyde Bellecourt and (?) Goff, vp of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, the assembled activists, unionists, faith community representatives and various culture groups including Aztec dancers, marched one block to the Hilton Hotel. The very diverse rally there in solidarity with the HERE local 17 and their demand for a contract with liveable wages for hotel and restaurant workers was a high point, with big puppets, flags and banners, a pinata, lots of drumming, several speakers and huge amounts of noise. The radical cheerleaders were both entertaining and educational. |
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For many months now the commercial media pundits have nursed a fawning obsession with the "boom economy." The fascination betrays a basic disconnect— the rich are indeed getting richer, but far too many of us continue to fall through the cracks. It's only too easy for them to ignore— the ever-accelerating consolidation of corporate media control lays to waste any pretentions of "objectivity." Their endless noise stands in as a saccharine diversion from the real economic news— the broad and growing campaign against corporate-sponsored globalization. May Day 2000 we continued to pry the lid from neo-liberalism's ugly public secrets. It was the biggest demonstration many of us had ever seen in downtown Minneapolis. Thousands marched in other cities. Like the other recent disruptions of Business As Usual, May 1 2000 was a truly global event. The international community that joined local unions and environmentalists in Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization Ministerial last November has become a sea change— the water's only going to get rougher, for the rich with their yachts... 50,000 people from around the world took the streets and shut down the WTO— it's become much harder to stuff popular dissent into a marginal little box. Thousands more converged on Washington, DC in April to shut down meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Police elected to shut down large parts of our nation's capital in response, encouraging federal employees to take the day off—the World Bank and the IMF were only able to count their beans once the cops declared the practical equivalent of Martial Law. The corporate media tested new boundaries to the surreal, somehow finding the event a "victory" for established order— it was a huge display of anti-capitalism's strength and potential, in the very seat of imperial economic power. Odds are good that future meetings of these institutions will require massive police repressions merely to take place. The WTO, the IMF and the World Bank together represent neoliberalism's enforcement wing, laying bare exploitation's new rules. Given the impacts of their programs, resistance becomes as natural as food and water. Already there are plans to suit up thousands of police to protect the next round of IMF meetings this fall in Prague— if what happened to their beseiged colleagues at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January is any guide, there's no longer any neutral ground for the cynical greedheads who would presume to rule us. Last month's actions in resistance to the IMF and the World Bank went in with a broad mandate— hundreds of organizations from around the world endorsed the demonstrations. These included environmental groups, faith-based organizations and unions. Endorsements also came from leaders of the Group of 77. This body, now representing 135 less-developed countries (80% of the world's population) was holding meetings in Cuba concurrent to the IMF/World Bank events in DC. The world's least developed countries, many still saddled with debts borrowed by long-departed corrupt dictators, have become caught in a vicious cycle— debts are only rescheduled if these sovereign nations agree to implement Structural Adjustment Programs: self-sufficiency is traded for dependence, government services for the ever-cynical whims of private capital. Witness the recent riots in Bolivia over water privatization, for example. SAPs are legal fictions for what was once called "colonialism"— plantation economies. A page is ripped straight from 1984— the programs (displacing millions for unwanted dams, plunging entire economies into hopelessness, etcetera) are often labeled "poverty reduction." For all these reasons May 1, 2000 was called as an International Day of Action Against Capitalism. People celebrated the original workers' holiday this weekend with street parties, festivals and acts of creative resistance in countries around the world. All the dry "boom economy" wind from all the well-fed pundits in the world will not pay the rent... There's an ugly cynicism within all the endless prattle about how much better "we" are "all" doing— pundits play with information for their livings; they should know better. The median wage hasn't been keeping up with the cost of living— scores of statistics bear out the fact. It was never a fair race to begin with. The suggestion that our fortunes are somehow dependent on bloated "corporate citizens" is both absurd and insulting— setting legal abstractions on par with the potential and the beauty of the human spirit betrays some pretty shady motives. Corporations, as we've all heard, are having some good times. Corporate profits were up 8.9% for fiscal year 1999— federal corporate tax revenues are down 2.5% for the same period. America had 268 billionaires last year. We also saw 31.4 million people living below the official poverty line. The typical American wage rose 80% through the 60s and 70s— an average wage-earner could buy a home and cover college for the kids. That's no longer the case. Productivity grew 46.5%, from 1973 to 1998, but wages did not keep pace. (Had they kept up, the median hourly wage in 1998 would have been $17.27.) The government makes itself complicit, defining the bottom line— despite a slight increase in the 1990s, the real value of the minimum wage is down 27 percent since 1968. If the government's unemployment figures included part-time workers seeking full-time work, unemployment would stand at 10%. Standard economic theory teaches that "low-skilled" workers suffer most from trade liberalization— broken down, they mean right about 70% of us. The numbers are bleaker yet for communities of color. That slogan the pundits have, about "a rising tide lifting all boats?" The income of the median black household was $25,231 in 1998— 60% of the median white household's income ($42,439). Hispanic households fared not much better, with a median income of $28,380— 67% of white income. Both the black and the hispanic poverty rates stand near 26%— three times the rate for white Americans. Economic figures considering gender are nearly as bad— women in America still only bring home 73 cents for every dollar that men do. Globalization's "rising tide" is not lifting all the boats. At the beginning of our new century, the top one percent of American households has more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. What remains of our natural environment has not fared much better under neo-liberalism's weight. A basic component of global trade— increased transportation— flies in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus on fossil fuels-induced climate destabilization. The vast majority of the planet's climate scientists would have no clear reason to lie to the world about global warming. New information confirms what we've known for a decade at least— fossil fuel emissions need to be reduced now if we're to leave our children a planet worth living on. Globalization's manic pace favors increased emissions over the more reasonable and natural alternative— encouraging local self-sufficiency. Globalization's "boom" carves up the only planet we have and spits back the bones. The WTO's unelected tribunal has not once upheld the labor, health or environmental laws of any nation, when challenged as a "trade barrier"— member countries must either remove these laws from their books or face crippling trade sanctions. IMF and World Bank projects heavily favor unwanted dams and nuclear power plants over conservation and sustaibaility— their work betrays a broad contempt for indigenous peoples and their lands. Transnational corporations, by their charming coincidence, haul away with thecash and do it all over again elsewhere, leaving the rest of us sitting on tree stumps and tailings pits. These are some of the reasons we took the streets on Monday. Ours was the biggest march against globalization Minneapolis has yet seen. People all over the world were doing the same thing. A movement that barely existed five years ago now draws out thousands of people— with that kind of momentum, it's all just a matter of time... |
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Over the past couple months I've had the opportunity to work some with the Mayday organizing collective. The experience has been vastly different from other attempts towards organizing I'd engaged in the past. The weight of outside responsibilities and priorities limited my participation to the weekly general meetings, but these were educational. They provided important insights and gave rise to some pretty central questions. I look forward to seeing how the experience informs future events for me. Like other collectives, the Mayday group organized itself around the principles of democratic consensus. This process flies in the face of more standard (and more hopeless) hierarchical arrangements this is probably why the cops and their accomplices still won't understand it. Consensus isn't always quick or efficient Tom Robbins' point, that "those who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get exactly what the deserve" comes to mind. Yet if we're serious about striving towards alternatives to the toxic and dreary power structures that we confront every day, it's well worth it to take the time and develop the skills to decide things by consensus. It's the ultimate threat to the establishment people arranging the decision-making process themselves, moving forward democratically. The means and the ends depend upon eachother. Within this endeavor it's also important to be willing to take the initiative. Consensus relies on input waiting to see if others have concerns with a given proposal isn't the way things get done. Initially I found myself somewhat skeptical of those who were able to initiate more projects than others were they trying to "run things?" Weeks into the organizing I finally recognized this hierarchical assumption for what it was focusing on those doing more of the organizing ignored the rest of us who, for whatever reasons, had not stepped forward to do things. Our opportunity to do so was always clear. This sort of expectation dependence, really on "leaders" to do the things we don't is nothing more than exactly how the dominant culture would like us to view things. And it becomes a wicked cycle all manner of monstrosities are allowed to happen, with the assumption that "someone else" will act to change things. How cheaply our autonomy is traded! The consensus process forces us to confront these ultimately hopeless assumptions. People come together to sort through ideas and plan actions: it's not a spectator event. We learn more about the divergent priorities and ideals of others around us that's about as grounded as democracy can be. Also relevant to the consensus process are the tactical and practical considerations how things get done, and why. A pamplet on Security Culture I scored at Earth Day events in Loring Park really opened my eyes to questions around these issues. Up to a point, I'd been going with the assumption that there was no real privacy, that the control freaks and their collaborators were omnipresent. Being somewhat open and transparent rather than "paranoid" seemed a good response. It also stimulated interest and participation from like-minded souls, I reasoned-- it probably does, but basic outlines should work fine for such purposes. Beyond that, why make it easy for The Man? Was this project about gaining "attention," or was it about getting things done? There is a difference. It's such a basic point some things are better left unsaid. Important security considerations aside, people will see events not by what is said beforehand but by what goes and happens... |
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Interested in sharing comments or reflections about the day for posting? Please send them to editor@circlevision.org |
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