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A street-level view of democracy in America, 2002 By
Jim Steitz "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!......." From a rooftop 20 stories above, they stared at us through cold, filtered, critical eyes. Safely cordoned behind two metal barricades and half the Washington, D.C. police force, they peered with an obtuse mixture of curiosity, contempt, and ignorance, dressed in sharp suits and accompanied by power-briefcases. "WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!......" My throat was scratched and dry from hours of yelling, chanting, and forcing democracy down the throat of the corporate and political elite who hold society's levers of power. I was joined by thousands of comrades from across the country, most of who were younger than my comparatively elderly 22 years. Our voices echoed down the corridors of Washington's elite Central-Northwest area, home to some of the most powerful and wealthy institutions in the world, as well as a shamefully large homeless community who watched with a strange mixture of inspiration and hopelessness from the margins of 18th and H Street. "MORE WORLD! LESS BANK!......." Across the police cordon lay the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, arguably the world's two most powerful institutions. Before them lay a platoon of police, armed with nightsticks, tear gas, rubber bullets, and full body armor, supposedly for defending against our signs, puppets, bandanas, flowers, megaphones, costumes, and other tools of metaphor. We approached them with love and empathy, searching to discern traces of sympathy, with mixed results. Pink and red streaks of street chalk pointed to officers designated as particular targets of our love. "WHAT DO WE WANT? JUSTICE!......." DC Police Chief Charles Ramsey had declared war on us from day one. Thousands of police hauled in from Virginia and Maryland had brutalized and attacked protesters without provocation or any violation of law. Ramsey idolized President Bush, ordering pre-emptive arrests and attacks. The DC police had broken the law thousands of times that weekend by engaging in false, without-cause arrest and suppression against us. A country whose existence is owed to the power of dissent and citizen organization had declared unpatriotic our dissent in the nation's capital, and to be violently suppressed, the law and the Constitution be damned. "AIN'T NO POWER LIKE THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE!......" Even through the thick glass and steel walls of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, our message attracted a mixture of ire and bewilderment. Our ranks included people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, demanding an end to the policies of these institutions that have destroyed their forests, their waters, and the lives of their families. The "neoliberal" economic policies, also known as the "Washington Consensus" that has been foisted upon the developing world are responsible for some of Earth's most horrific human and environmental suffering. To the suits, briefcases and the walking corpses behind them, those people were mere statistics. To us, they were brothers and sisters. Their blood was our blood, their pain our pain. As one President might say, you're either with us or against us. "BECAUSE THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE DON'T STOP!....." Some said that, after 9/11, irony and cynicism were dead. That hypothesis died here, in the institutionalized cesspool of paternalism and greed hiding behind the police and steel. Even Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Krugman -- three respected, premier economists whose opinions could, without much exaggeration, be said to represent the "Washington Consensus" --had at least partially defected. They could no longer share the stubborn and dogged ability of the Washington Consensus to sustain its ideologically fundamentalist view of the world against the overwhelming tide of contrary evidence, piled high and counted in acres lost, parts per million pollution, and human lives destroyed. While Islamic fundamentalism has attracted the world's attention over the past year, the free-market fundamentalism incubating behind those doors is far more dangerous and powerful, and continues to kill on a scale that make the 19 hijackers look like boy scouts. Several souls in our contingent had seen their brothers and sisters killed by pollution from Shell's oil derricks, or the security forces servicing ExxonMobil pipelines, or the unreasonable prices for water and health care demanded by the neoliberal economic schemes designed by the briefcase-people. "HEY-HEY, HO-HO! THE WORLD BANK HAS GOT TO GO!....." A few blocks away, George Bush and his team of market fundamentalists were busily working to create the Free-Trade Area of the Americas, using the crushing political and economic power of America to draw the rest of Latin America into a scheme that would consign it to eternal corporate rule, environmental destruction, and human oppression. A few thousand miles away, poor families in Argentina and Bolivia were busily constructing new democracies, bypassing the corrupt agents of multinational corporations who doubled as Presidents. It didn't seem a fair fight. We were closer to those families than to the inert bodies in suits across the street. I watched in awe as the 17-year olds derided by the corporate media as spoiled ingrates (except, apparently, when being clubbed by police) achieved a global solidarity and consciousness that humbles and shames anything offered by the media pinheads and arrogant political spinsters on the evening news. After pausing to catch my breath, I glanced at the young girl standing beside me, whose bruises and scars betrayed a weekend of police brutality for which she harbored no anger. In the sparkle of her eye, I discerned a wisdom and a promise that somehow, we will overcome.
Jim Steitz is a USU student and frequent contributor to the Hard News Cafe
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