New York snoozer
>> Contrary to popular expectations, the anti-WEF protests turned out to be largely peaceful and
non-confrontational. Is the anti-capitalist
movement changing its approach, or have the police finally figured out how to control it?

Story and photos by CRAIG SEGAL

The World Economic Forum, held in New York City January 31 to February 4, could have been another violent rumble like Seattle or Genoa. But in the post-9-11 climate, police blocked activists every step they took, challenging them for a battle the activists could never win. As many as 15,000 protesters took part in last weekend’s WEF protests. As of Tuesday police had made over 200 arrests.

Thursday, 8:30 p.m. at the Students for Global Justice ConferencePlenary Address on the topic of Globalization, Militarism, the Neoliberal Agenda and its Discontents at Synod Hall, St. John’s the Divine Cathedral (across from Columbia University)

The big speaker tonight is Amy Goodman, an activist and host of Democracy Now!, a popular independent left-wing radio show broadcast all over the world on radio, cable TV and the Internet. She is addressing a wave of fear that has fallen over activism in New York since 9-11, the same fear that kept many activist Montrealers from venturing across the border this weekend. “Each one of you who stands in the streets to protect what you believe is protecting thousands of people!” Goodman yells.

Goodman complained that the New York City newspapers “are smearing activists” to “provide justification for police violence.” Goodman refers to a report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) that says, “Mainstream New York City newspapers have tended to frame discussion of the demonstrations in terms of their status as a security problem.” According to the report, posted on FAIR’s Web site, “most articles in the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and Newsday mentioning the WEF have focused on police preparations for the protests. As a result, the political debate over the WEF has been obscured, as have concerns about police brutality and civil liberties.”

The report quotes a Daily News article, dated January 13, referring to anti-WEF activists as “legions of agitators,” “crazies,” “parasites” and “kooks.” The paper threatens activists, saying “You have a right to free speech, but try to disrupt this town, and you’ll get your anti-globalization butts kicked. Capish?”

“It’s hard to read such rhetoric as anything other than an attempt to manipulate New Yorkers’ legitimate anger and grief over September 11 in order to whip up a backlash against dissent,” the report says.
To cheers from the crowd, Goodman says corporations also terrorize people, by working with politicians like Henry Kissinger to overthrow democratically elected governments to maximize profits. “Yes, Osama bin Laden should be brought before [an international war crimes tribunal], and people like Henry Kissinger should be tried as well.”
Goodman also criticizes mainstream media for not attending the evening’s speeches, and praised independent media. “It is essential media come into places like this. Yes, I see cameras,” she says, referring to roughly two dozen still and digital cameras. “But I don’t see the networks.”

Around 10 p.m. at an Anti-Capitalist Convergence meeting at the Good Shepherd Faith Church at 152 W 66th between Broadway and Amsterdam

“It’s the easiest time I’ve ever had crossing the border,” Montreal-based veteran activist Jaggi Singh whispers inside the meeting. Singh says he was refused once, and twice held and questioned for two hours before being allowed through.

The meeting is democratic, as people offer suggestions on how the protest should go on Saturday. It’s late to organize such a massive protest. But the protesters are not procrastinators. The World Economic Forum has been in Davos, Switzerland since 1971; organizers only announced November 7 that they would be moving the WEF to New York. Many of the usual activist groups chose not to participate, leaving the ball with the relatively small Anti-Capitalist Convergence.

After about an hour, celebrity musician Billy Bragg shows up for an impromptu performance. “By coincidence I happened to be in the city promoting some new songs,” he says. A buddy from a pro-worker group called Jobs With Justice convinced him to rally the troops with a few jingles. “It’s my one chance to connect with people here,” Billy says. “The job of a singer is not to change the world, but to focus the feelings of people who want to change the world. As singer-songwriters we don‘t have any answers.”

But Billy proves himself wrong when he half-performs/half-lectures at the end of the meeting: “Our enemy really is cynicism,” he says, walking around a clearing in the middle of the room. “Cynicism is the lowest form of human nature.”

Around 2 a.m. at the IndyMedia Center at 34 E 29th

It is starting to become clear that there are some pretty hard-core activists in New York. The scene is full of people who choose to live poor and struggle for what they believe in, even if that means picking food out of garbage cans. I meet 34-year-old John Tarleton at the IndyMedia Center. Tarleton has a small site with his articles (www.cybertraveler.org) and describes himself as an activist and independent journalist. Asked how he gets by, Tarleton says he makes around $5,000 a year doing migrant farm work for several months. He spends the rest of the year couch surfing, writing and scavenging for food in New York City dumpsters. “The dumpsters in New York are prolific,” he says behind one of a dozen computer terminals. “There’s just so much good food that goes out every night. I can go around the corner anytime I want and get fresh bagels.” Tarleton says he lives poor for political reasons: he doesn’t pay income tax. “I never wanted to support the war machine.”

Friday, 8 a.m. at Democracy Now! studio, the attic of a converted firehouse on Lafayette Street, near the World Trade Center clean-up site

In an round-table discussion between WEF honouree Van Jones, Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos Horta of East Timor, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Joseph Nye, and Montreal’s own Singh, things get testy when Horta condemns activists who damage property. Singh responds that they should be talking about “the real violence in the world” committed by corporations and governments against developing countries.

“What I find really disgusting is the idea that to be opposing the WEF is to somehow dishonour the tragedy that people have gone through. But it’s New Yorkers who are making the call to oppose the World Economic Forum. It’s New Yorkers who are coming up and saying it’s cynical and disgusting that they would—as many people have put it—hide behind the dead, to co-opt what has happened and use it to serve the purposes of global capitalism. I think New York is a city that tolerates dissent, not only that tolerates it, but celebrates it. And I think for me this is very inspiring, that the door that has resulted from Seattle has remained open.”

Horta’s response? “I have learned to refuse to be drawn into ideological dogmas. Sometimes the left believes it holds a monopoly on the truth, on all the answers. In this regard it’s quite similar to the extreme right. The two sides always claim to know all the answers to everything.”

Later, over a greasy spoon breakfast with Singh and a young New York female activist called Warcry, whose face was given a full page in the February 5 Village Voice, I ask if 9-11 has disheartened her. “There’s a lot to be disheartened by,” she says. “Post-9-11 there’s been a lot of recruiting by far-right Nazi groups. Nationalism is on the rise. Bush and the government are getting everything they want out of this 9-11 tragedy domestically and abroad. At the same time, these terrorist attacks are kind of a wake-up call. A lot more people are a lot more critical now. For the first time people are looking at the world and saying, ‘It’s not working.’”

11 a.m. Saturday morning at Columbus Circle at the southwest corner of Central Park

Around 7,000 activists rally at 10 a.m. in colourful costumes. They’re making music, handing out pamphlets, cheering, dancing, and singing. A group of fake billionaires in black suits and dresses mock-protests the protesters. A group of women with strap-on missile dildos pretend to hump each other, chanting, “I’m going to put my missile in your country!” Cameras click as drumming groups warm up.
Protesters are high-tech. One young man monitoring police frequencies on a futuristic little radio communicates to organizers via an earpiece attached to a cell phone. An activist tells me a benefactor bought the equipment, and is following proceedings by computer, walkie-talkie and cell phone in a secret loft.
At 12:30 p.m. the rally snakes through mid-town to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where the WEF’s 2,700 business execs and government leaders are meeting. As we walk, it becomes increasingly clear we are being led into a cordoned-off protest zone. Protesters are kept penned into a narrow walking space by fences and a wall of over 4,000 shoulder-to-shoulder cops. Other police zigzag around on little scooters, prance around on horseback, or do their best to fit in undercover. It is nearly impossible to organize cells— like the notorious Black Block— out of view of police without disrupting the flow of the crowd and causing a commotion.

At 1:30 p.m., alarm spreads through the ranks as police arrest 27 people for wearing masks and carrying shields. Police say they had received information that the group “was about to attack [them].” Disoriented, people continue to march like mice through a maze— many thinking the real battle will happen in front of the Waldorf.
But at the Waldorf, protesters have no room to move, completely surrounded by fences and riot police. “This is total control,” Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, tells me. Protesters, police and journalists take breaks from the cold to sip coffee together at a nearby Starbucks. Protesters’ numbers dwindle until 8 p.m., when time runs out on the protesters’ permit for the space.

Post WEF

A New York Times reporter tells me the activist message was muddled and accomplished nothing. He said if activists were really angry, they would have protested harder. They would have screamed and broken Gap windows.
Some activists feel let down there wasn’t more of a fight. “I’d say the WEF protests were a joke,” writes Peter Gelderloos on the New York IndyMedia Web site. “Thousands of people came out to show that another world is possible, but the only ones who put themselves on the line to help bring about that world were abandoned in the streets, left to be arrested by overwhelming numbers of New York’s finest.”
Protesters continued to demonstrate without permits into this week. By press time, activists have been protesting outside the Criminal Court Building on 100 Center Street against the 200-plus arrests, and alleged illegal procedures, like denying lawyers
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s anti-protest strategies—like corralling the protesters the length of their march and breaking up their ranks—will go down in cop textbooks as some of the most brilliant in history. Everyone thought New York would be another violent mess. In the flag-covered streets of post-9-11 New York, the media had pretty much given police carte blanche. So much, in fact, that many protesters chose to sit this one out. :