Margaret continues talking about how people confronted trade summit after trade summit, fighting tooth, nail, and pom-pom against unelected world governance.
Sources:
https://crimethinc.com/2021/11/30/epilogue-on-the-movement-against-capitalist-globalization-22-years-after-n30-what-it-can-teach-us-today
http://www.ainfos.ca/99/jun/ainfos00181.html
https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/18/flashback-to-june-18-1999-the-carnival-against-capital-a-retrospective-video-and-comic
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/j18.htm
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that whenever there's
bad things happening in the world, there's people trying to do
good things. And I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and this
week I would also say that this is the podcast
I record. Well, I have a cold and I'm sleepy
because I just woke up and I'm about to drive
(00:23):
for like fourteen hours. But that's okay. And what you
might have noticed is that it is not Wednesday, but
in fact Monday. Well it's actually whatever day of the
week you listen to this, but if you listen to
it on the day it comes out, it's Monday, not Wednesday.
And yet I left you recently with a cliffhanger saying
(00:45):
that I would talk to you on Wednesday, and here
it is a Monday. And all that is to say,
this episode came out late, and for that I apologize.
Some people I care about and had to deal with
some hard things in rapid secession, and then I went
and got sick in the middle of that. And everyone
(01:05):
is as okay as could be given the circumstances. And
here I am back at work talking into a microphone
while sleepy as sick. I'm not supposed to tell you
I'm sleepy. I'm high energy. Welcome to First Thing in
the Morning with Margaret Kiljoy. I think that's what I'm
supposed to do. I am telling you the story of
the alter Globalization movement right now as best as I can,
(01:28):
and I'll probably start interjecting my own story into it
soon here and there, because, as I've probably said at nauseum,
this is the movement that radicalized me. Where we last
left our nameless heroes, they'd built up people's global action
out of the encounters called for by the Zapatistas. They'd
had a sort of trailer episode for the alter globalization
(01:50):
movement in London with the Carnival against Capitalism. Then, as
we covered in some earlier episodes, the big entrance to
the global stage happened in November nineteen ninety nine, the
famed Battle of Seattle, which happened in well, you guessed it, Seattle.
After Seattle, activists were like, oh, fuck, yeah, okay, let's
(02:10):
do the next big thing. And the answer to what
the next big thing was was that the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank were meeting in April two
thousand in Washington, DC. And I have talked a lot
about the IMF and the World Bank on this show
a couple months ago during my home Why Neoliberalism Is
(02:31):
Bad episodes. But the shortest version is that the IMF
and the World Bank are very very similar institutions that
both lend money at predatory rates to developing countries, and basically,
after they loan you some money, they demand that those
countries adopt structural adjustment programs, which got the environmental legislation
(02:53):
and labor rights of those countries in order for those
countries to repay the interest on those loans. And it
basically traps into predatory situations and takes all of the
money from the poor people and gives it to the
rich people, and just does all of the things that
capitalism does, but just at like this wild frantic pace.
(03:14):
It's kind of like if an entire country borrowed money
from organized crime and then the mafia was like, all right,
now you're going to restructure your entire life to pay
us back. Like if you've ever seen a crime movie
where the crime man is stuck doing the dirty work
for the bosses because he owes them more money than
he can ever earn back. Oh, what was the recent one.
(03:35):
There's a really good Pedro Pescal killing Nazis movie that
came out recently that was super kind of indie that
I think got into this stuff. Unless I'm getting my
movies mixed up, which happens more than I would like anyway. Okay,
So a movie like that, crime man is stuck doing
the dirty work for the bosses because he owes them
(03:55):
money that he can ever pay back. That is what
the IMF in the World Bank or up to, at
least according to the activist position, the ANTIIMF and World
Bank position, which is a position that I think is
a reasonable analysis of the situation. So the IMF and
the World Bank were meeting up in DC and protesters
(04:16):
were like, well, we were already planning. Like I was
going to say, like after Seattle, they were like, what's next,
and they would go and do this thing. And that's true,
but they were already planning this as well, and they
were like, all right, we're going to do this thing
in April after Seattle. It just that after Seattle there
was just so so much more energy for that to happen,
(04:39):
so much more inertia because people had actually protested the
IMF meetings in DC the year before, actually the day
of that Carnival against Capitalism that we talked about a
couple weeks ago, that was a much bigger deal in London.
And the reason we didn't talk about the DC version
of it is that it was like fifty people holding
(05:01):
signs and marching around and they briefly tried to get
into the street. And I mean, those protests happen every
single day all over the world, and we don't usually
cover them. Sorry, fifty person protests. I certainly have organized
more than my share of those, but they don't get
(05:21):
cool people did cool stuff episodes. Although that said, fifty
people can accomplish an awful lot. It's just when you're
at the like, you know, I wish this was a
bigger protest stage. You're usually not getting that much done.
But that I'd been nineteen ninety nine. Now it's a
new millennium. It is the year two thousand. Oh my god,
(05:42):
do you remember when people argued about whether it was
two thousand or two thousand and one that was the
new millennium? What a terrible argument I have. My position.
My position is that Pluto is a planet, and bronosauruses
are real, and the year two thousand is the new
millennium because the number changed, it is the year two thousand.
It is the new millennium. And the wind is at
(06:05):
their back. Their collective back momentum was with them. The
organizers were organized. The way that you make these protests
happen is you don't just say, like, show up in DC,
let's go, everyone will just magically self organize. Calling for
a protest and then being like it'll just work is
(06:29):
like that magical thinking where some people of some genders
think that the dishes just wash themselves, or that the
stuff that they leave on the coffee table just disappears. No,
it takes work. Organizing is work. Also, you can't just
(06:50):
organize a protest based on the idea of everyone should
just make fun signs and wear silly hats and show up.
I mean you can, and you can get numb Muer's
that with that, you just can't change anything by doing that.
That's not how change works. You have to organize protests
(07:11):
that are disruptive. That's the idea of protests. So the
organizers organized, They organized their asses off the protests were
the result of spokes council meetings, which we talked about before.
It's where one person you have a big group and
you send one person to a spokes council to go
(07:31):
and make decisions collectively and or just share information and
come back and report back. The protests were the result
of spokes council meetings all over the country to determine
tactics and messaging and to coordinate everything. And they were
drawing upon a long legacy of activism. We're going to
talk about that in a second part of how the
(07:52):
movement spread, This Ulter globalization movement, Oh, I most did it.
I grew up calling it the anti globalization movement. I
just understand and retrospect why that was bad framing that
the media gave us and we probably shouldn't have embraced.
Part of how this movement spread is that anyone who
went to Seattle from this or that town, they would
(08:13):
go home and do a report back event. You know.
It was hard to get people out to Seattle, right,
and so you have big groups like DC. You had
this affinity group that was like, all right, we're sending
one person to Seattle, you know, but maybe you're from Toledo,
and you're like, all right, I went to Seattle and
you didn't get sent as part of an affinity group,
but you just like got your shit together, got on
(08:35):
a bus or a plane or whatever. I went to Seattle.
You come back and you just give a report back.
You put an event together, a physical, in person event,
and this is a model we should bring back. Someone
will just go and explain their experiences and this or
that social movement that happened elsewhere in a report back.
(08:57):
You don't have to be the anarchist speaker or whatever.
You know, you don't have to be some special person.
You just need to have done a thing and then
want to tell your friends about it. I mean, it's
the equivalent of like when the people would go on
vacation and have put together slide shows in there. Maybe
you all are old enough to remember people doing that,
(09:18):
Maybe you're not. That's the thing people used to do.
I remember, early on in my activism, I was in
Portland and I went to this report back at the
Red and Black Cafe, just an anarchist cafe. You can
probably guess by the name where some American anarchists had
spent the summer squatting in Barcelona, and what is that
(09:38):
other than their vacation trip, right, But they came back
with photos and did a presentation discussing all the tactics
that people used there, and this just helps create an
international culture. If you're sitting somewhere in Portland, you haven't
left the country as an adult or maybe at all,
(10:00):
and someone is just saying to you, like, hey, this
is what our comrades are doing in Chile, this is
what our comrades are doing in Japan. You know that
is a good thing to do. And so yeah, after Seattle,
lots of people who couldn't go to Seattle went and
saw people from their own towns talk about what they
(10:22):
saw there and tell their stories and to just break
the idea of I don't know that you need to
be someone special to go do that. I hate to
get in my rocking chair and talk shit, but this
was probably a more effective recruitment tactic than just posting
about what you've done to Instagram. But do you know
(10:43):
what else is more effective than Instagram? Podcast ads? I
suspect they're more effective than Instagram ads. Actually I don't
know if that's true. Both of them are probably effective
what I usually do with Instagram ads. They're very good
at showing me things that it looked like the things
that I want to buy, and then I just google
that product plus Reddit and then I read the Reddit
(11:03):
reviews where they're like, that's a fake product, this is garbage.
Don't buy that weird dress. And then I don't buy
the weird dress, and then I don't have the articles
of my clothing in my closet that are left over
from before I did that that I never wear. But
here's our ads and we're back, okay. Although the ultra
(11:26):
globalization movement itself was very international and people were coming
from all over and it's spread all over the place,
and I'm sure I will be doing episodes specifically talking
about like the South Korean farmers and all of these
movements that were happening elsewhere in the world. Each local
area had its own protest culture. You throw a protest
(11:47):
in Seattle, you're going to get the Seattle people on
some level and the West Coast people on some level, right,
which means you're going to get fucking environmentalists. I say this,
I mean spent a lot of time as a West
Coast environment the East Coast activists came from a slightly
different lineage. Folks were coming out of all sorts of campaigns,
(12:08):
like the anti apartheid movement that was pushing countries to
divest from apartheid South Africa. The support movement for Leonard
Peltier was a big part of it. Leonard Peltier is
an American Indian movement activist we've talked about on this
show who spent decades upon decades in prison and as
a result of being accused of shooting and killing a
(12:31):
federal agent who was rating a reservation. Even though other
people admitted to doing that crime and got off on
self defense, he spent most of his life in prison
and that's not great, and so people were trying to
work to support him. There was also the support movement
for Mumia Abu Jamal we haven't covered on this show yet.
(12:53):
He's on the cover of people I will be talking
about on this show. Mumiya is a black journalist who
has been in prison since nineteen eighty two and he
spent much of that time on death row. His sentence
was later changed to life without parole. He's convicted of
killing a cop in Philly, a cop who had shot
him and nearly killed him. And this is another moment
(13:15):
of a black man being in prison for the crime
of refusing to die. He also maintains his innocence that
he didn't shoot that police officer at all, and that's
completely possible, and you know what, I would be supporting
him either way. It's okay for people to refuse to
die when the state wants to kill you. His supporters
(13:35):
generally argue that the reason he was framed was that
he worked as a journalist who investigated the police, and
in particular he was associated with the move movement in Philly,
which is a whole different story I need to tell
you one day. But if you ever think to yourself,
I wonder if the police have ever firebombed a neighborhood
in the US from a helicopter, destroying sixty five houses
(13:57):
just because of some Black power activists and killed a
lot of children in a way that is oddly reminiscent
of the Waco Siege, yet doesn't get talked about because
it wasn't right wing white people. The answer is yes,
and you should look up the move bombing of nineteen
eighty five if you want to be angry at the government.
Mumiya supported those folks. He supported them before the bombing.
(14:20):
They were being targeted a lot before the bombing as well.
Mumia was in prison the time of up. The reason
that Mumia was moved from death row and given life
in prison was that there was and is a massive
movement supporting him, a movement that has continued for decades.
For example, in nineteen ninety five, when the execution timeline
(14:43):
was moved up to kill Mumia sooner, protests kicked off
across the country, and Mumia protests were often spicy affairs,
as are frankly most protest parches that accomplish anything. There
was a torchlit march and I think San Francisco, but
it might have been the East Bay. I have somehow
moved between the two. I just read both and whatever.
(15:04):
There was a torchlit march in nineteen ninety five where
people barricaded the streets and all these folks from food
out bombs and the Chicano Youth Center. I think often
the same people were fighting against cops who are throwing
concussion grenades and all that shit. In nineteen ninety nine,
on April twenty fourth, there was a millions from Mamea March,
one of the first black bloc protests in the US,
(15:25):
and a lot of East Coast activists were coming out
of support for Mameia for support for move for support
for the American Indian movement, the anti apartheid movement, and
they also came out of punk. We've talked a lot
about the anarcho punk movement in the UK, especially when
we talked about bands like Crass and Tumbawamba and how
(15:46):
that movement was an actual counterculture and how it had
actual real world impacts on the political and cultural landscape
of England and the world. And we've talked a little
bit about punk in the US during the eighties. You
can go back and listen to our episodes about Anti
Racist Action, which was the group that kind of dealt
successfully dealt with the Nazi punk problem. But we haven't
(16:08):
talked as much about US punk and politics yet more broadly,
and it'll probably get its own episodes. But I'm gonna
do a little side quest real quick. Hardcore punk, which
is not just people who are really into punk, but
a specific subgenre of punk that I frankly don't like
as much as the other subgenres. I feel really bad.
(16:30):
I have this friend who's a singer of a hardcore band,
and at one point he was like, Magpie, do you
like my band? And I was like, it's all right,
but I don't really like hardcore all that much. And
he looks at me and he goes, well, what don't
you like about hardcore? And I looked at him and
I decided to be honest, and I was like, the vocals.
I don't like the vocals. This is not a way
(16:52):
to endear yourself to your friend who's the vocalist of
a hardcore band. I have since learned, Sorry, my friend,
if you're listening, I actually like your band. I just
am not a huge hardcore fan. Whatever. Hardcore in many
ways developed. A lot of it comes out of DC,
and hardcore is a cool and interesting scene. It has
(17:13):
always been very political. One source I use all the
time on this show, including this week, is the anarchist
news and analysis group crime Think, who've been around since
the nineties, and they're closely fafiliated with the anarchist hardcore scene,
especially in their early development. Because that's the thing is
that punk was among the other was among the groups
(17:38):
that kept anarchism and certain types of anti authoritarian leftism
alive during a period when not as many groups were
keeping that alive. Anyway, I just saw the Crime Think
published band Catharsis play a show like two weeks ago,
and they have such good political banter. They're up there
(17:59):
reminding everyone that the point of the music isn't just
emotional release, which is ironic to their name Catharsis, but
to build community with one another so that people can
work together to challenge the police and the state. It's
good shit, and they have a new album out and
I actually really like their new music. I take it
all back. I'm a fan anyway. Hardcore punk has a
(18:20):
fuck ton of roots in DC, especially in the eighties
and nineties. Straight edge culture comes out of hardcore punk.
You've got Minor Threat and there's Fugazi and shit who
are like always keeping it real about making sure that
music is anti capitalist, and you've got a bunch of
people doing activism in DC built around hardcore punk and
also Riot Girl under the banner positive Force. I think
(18:45):
this is where posi punk comes from, but I'm not
sure which is like punk but positive. I'm such a hater.
I'm so sorry everyone. It's not a political judgment at all.
I'm just a weird old goth and I used to
be a young, weird goth. I once went to a
Positive Youth fest in DC and felt ancient when I
(19:07):
was like twenty four and there were people giving each
other jumping double high fives in the pit, and that's
actually really cool. It was a cool thing to witness.
I just didn't feel like I was part of it.
I feel a little outside of when I was twenty four,
I was feeling a little outside of POSI life. Positive
Force threw punk shows that were all ages and sober,
(19:28):
and every show was a fundraiser for anarchists and progressive causes.
All sorts of bands, famous and forgotten alike played Positive
Force fundraisers. Fugazi headlined like fifty shows for them, Bikini
Killed played shows for them, Dave Grohl played shows for
them before his Nirvana era. And you'll be proud of
me for not doing a long aside here about my
(19:49):
theory that Kurt Cobain was an anarchist and probably well,
I hate to transvestigate super hard, I just like Kurt.
Positive Force was also a big part of the riot
girl scene. Like mostly it gets talked about from a
hardcore scene point of view, but a lot of the
idea of women being like, no, we're going to do
(20:10):
some separate organizing within this larger structure, and you're just
going to put up with that, which was an important
part of social movements. A lot of that comes out
of the riot girl scene, and some of it comes
out of Positive Force. So you've got these people throwing shows,
and at all these shows, people are talking about political issues.
(20:31):
There's free literature everywhere, and it radicalized just a ton
of people. As of ten years ago. I read an
article from twenty fifteen. The Collective is still around, though
they were gentrified out of their collective house in the
year two thousand. Anyway, Positive Force was a big part
of the DC organizing scene as well. So you have
this like really positive take on punk and anarchism. And
(20:55):
I think that that I'm now conjecturing, I'm now doing original,
not really search putting together my own dots. I think
the fact that it's this positive punk scene is a
big part about why well the Black Block in particular
behave the way it did during DC. And I don't
know that that's I'm just guessing now. One youth that
(21:19):
Positive Force did not recruit was a young Margaret Killjoy.
I grew up roughly in the DC area. I don't
want to say too much more specifically than that, because
they all are parasocial. Sometimes I love you Sometimes. I
didn't go to these protests because they sounded sort of
nonsensical to me based on what I'd seen in the media.
(21:41):
This is not speaking well of me this particular part.
What didn't help me is that the most radical kid
in my friend group, who blasted rage against the machine
all the time, his mom worked for the IMF, and
he told us that the IMF was good. Actually, so
I didn't go to the A sixteen protests. The main
group organizing the A sixteen protests have I mentioned that
(22:05):
I hate this method of naming protests enough, Yet they
were to happen on April sixteenth, so they were called
A sixteen in a long lineage of naming method that
annoys Margaret. The main organizing group was this coalition called
Mobilization for Global Justice. It was a big coalition, not
a single group, and it brought together unions, NGOs and
(22:27):
scrappier more DIY and anarchic activists. There was understandably a
tension between these groups, but sometimes that tension is what
produced the most beautiful results. You've got the dropout anarchists
who are sometimes some of them are the summit hoppers
who would like ride freight trains and live in squats
(22:49):
and eat out of dumpsters and do a ton of organizing.
They weren't just there for a good time. The idea
is that you don't need a full time job if
you eat and live outside, so you can dedicate yourself
to unpaid activism. This is in contrast to the professional
activists who worked for NGOs and would fly to protests
(23:12):
and collect a paycheck for organizing. And both sides of
this debate or way of living whatever they sometimes got
along and sometimes thought the other was full of shit.
The professional activists were called helicopter activists or swoopers for
showing up from California or wherever and telling locals how
to do things. There was endless critiques of the traveler kids,
(23:37):
the broke ones, the summit hoppers, and how they would
drain local resources and not give enough back. I have
a lot of thoughts about this dichotomy but mostly I
think that discourse and its consequences have been a disaster
for the human race. I think that people just do
things differently, and it's okay to be critical of each other,
but it's also better to figure out what our mutual
(23:59):
strengths are and how we can encourage each other to
play to our strengths Together. All these disparate activists put
on trainings and recruited people and did consensus based organizing
across the country to bring people together to shut down
the IMF and the World Bank. They called for a
whole week of protests. Another reason that calling at a
(24:21):
sixteen is nonsensical is that it was a whole week,
and more or less they were like, all right, let's
do what worked in Seattle, you know, specifically this idea
of organizing where everyone was going to break into affinity
groups that were going to organize into clusters and people
would pick different intersections and things like that to shut
down the IMF. From a grand strategy point of view,
(24:41):
these protests were very successful. From the immediate strategy point
of view of shutting down the IMF meeting, they were
not as successful. Activists did another newspaper rap where you
print up a fake front page of a newspaper and
then go around and put it on the newspapers and
the boxes and the stands. They did this at like
four in the morning one night, probably dozens of people
(25:03):
I don't actually know, because they wrapped twenty thousand copies
of the Washington Post to talk about the IMF. Crews
went out night after night to wheat paste anti IMF
flyers all over town. And this is a good example
of the solidarity between NGOs and the scrappy air activists
because the material costs for these things was paid for
(25:23):
by someone who presumably had an organization's funds behind them,
but probably not all of the people doing this were
professional activists. Folks set up a convergence center with a
garage area for giant puppet assembly. See our episodes about
bread and Puppet for lots about giant puppets. Churches opened
(25:44):
up their doors for protesters to sleep on the floor.
This is another thing that people are like. There's always
been solidarity between religious activists and non religious activists, at
least as long as I've been involved in anything, and
that gets forgotten about all the time I've slept on
some church floors. Marching bands showed up. Radical cheerleading squads
(26:05):
were there with pom poms and cheers. Food not Bombs
set up a flying brigade passing out food from shopping
carts to protesters. Indie media was there, The National Lawyer's
Guild was there. Everyone we've been talking about was there. Everyone,
but Margaret, I don't have FOMO. I don't know what
you're talking about. On Saturday, April fifteenth, the day before
(26:25):
the big day of action, police shut down the Convergon Space.
They also arrested. Look, I read a report that says
they arrested thirteen hundred and fifty people that day on
the fifteenth, in a rain of tear gas and pepper spray.
But I suspect that's conflating with the next day. They
certainly arrested a bunch of people on the fifteenth. I
(26:47):
just couldn't tell you about the numbers on the level
of research that I was able to do this week.
But yeah, they came and they shut down the Conversion space.
But you know what, the cops can't shut down. In fact,
you know what, the cops don't even want to shut
down advertising. That's right. Advertising. This podcast is brought to
(27:09):
you by advertising, and we're back. So this still didn't
stop the protests. All of these arrests as more people
flooded into the city for the big day. Not me.
I went into the city that day, but I went
to go to a youth pride festival that was entirely unrelated,
(27:33):
And while I was on the subway, a woman dressed
up like a fairy asked me if me and my
friends were going to the protests against the IMF. I asked,
what's the IMF and she said basically, they loan money
to developing countries and it's bad. And I was like, yeah, whatever, lady.
It took me two more years before I joined the movement.
This is not actually the person dressed up like a
(27:54):
fairy's fault, but she probably could have had her talking
points down a little better. I've probably met her since.
If you're listening person dressed up like a fairy at
a sixteen who tried to convince some kids on the subway.
Sorry anyway, twenty thousand people were there, at least tons
(28:16):
of people locked down in intersections, once again hoping to
shut down enough of DC to prevent the meetings from happening. Again.
This wasn't as successful this time from that point of view.
After getting their asses kicked in Seattle, people wore more
padding and armor. I read one story about a protester
getting his junk run over by a police scooter and
(28:37):
the reason that his junk survived as he was wearing
a cup. Critical mass was there, which are bike protesters.
They were kind of everywhere. Many of them were arrested
for riding bikes on city streets. Comms teams went around
with year two thousand era cell phones and lots of radios,
helping everyone know what was happening. And the Black Block
(29:00):
picked a different tactic this time. Rather than roving to
break things while the police were sort of busy elsewhere,
they kind of inverted that idea. A spokes council of
several hundred Black Block folks agreed that the block would
work more actively in solidarity with the lockdowns. They would
look to draw police away from the more vulnerable people.
(29:23):
To quote one lockdowner, Leela from an oral history that
I'll link to in the show notes put together by
Crime Think quote, I'd seen police violence previously, and I'm
familiar with police violence that's worse than this but I'd
never before seen police walk into a crowd of people
and slug people like that, just with abandon. The Black
(29:44):
Block came at that moment when blood was streaming down
people's faces and essentially pushed the police out of our intersection.
They were just this wall of bodies that pushed them
out and saved our intersection from any further police abuse.
I've forever been grateful to that Black Block for hearing
on the walkie talkies that we needed help and coming
(30:05):
so powerfully to our aid. And I think about that
all the time. I think about the sort of heroic
mode of the Black Block, and I think about, well,
nothing gets to me more than moments of solidarity like this.
You're thinking, Margaret, can you turn this into a Lord
of the Rings reference? I can. I think of the
(30:28):
Ride of the Rohim when the people of Rohan come
to Gondor in their moment of aid. That's what I
think about. And the Block, instead of being on horseback
with swords, they were like behind entire chain link fences.
There's photos of this. They went to a construction site
and they pulled up these like huge chunks of chain
(30:50):
link fence and we're just charging police lines to push
them back. A participant talked about their strategy that they
didn't want to do what they'd done in Seattle again,
but that also quote, we're not going to get voluntarily arrested,
or we're not going to sit in the street while
they put pepper spray in her eyes. We are going
to fight back against police abuse if needed end quote.
(31:14):
The strategy of shutting down the meeting didn't work, not
like it had in Seattle. Most people realized that early
on that it wasn't going to work, but decided they
were going to make such a fuss that the whole
thing would draw endless attention to the IMF and its horrors,
and people did block delegates wherever they could, and again,
on a grand strategy level, this was a very successful protest.
(31:35):
The police just attacked wherever and however they wanted, just
wading in and smashing people in the face with batons
and shit. They ran people over with police scooters, and
the street medics had their work cut out for them.
Many of the lockdowns and many intersections lasted all day.
At the end of the day, the way that they
got the lock boxes out and then disappeared into the
(31:56):
crowd to not get arrested. Was that when a mark
came by with like giant banners and puppets and shit,
they were like, hey, come over here, and then they
like kind of disassembled everything and smuggled it out in
the crowd. And that's pretty cool. And the police actually
did most of the work to shut down DC. That's
the other thing is like some people shut down a
few intersections, the police shut down way way more of DC.
(32:22):
Around twelve hundred people were arrested, or thousands of people
are arrested, or thirteen hundred and fifty people were arrested
on a fifteen alone. I don't know, and I'm really
annoyed that I don't know, because this is the kind
of information I used to track about every single protest
because my brain works a certain way. A lot of
people were arrested, at least twelve hundred. That's the lowest
number I've seen. Thousands. It is another number I've seen.
(32:45):
The Legal Peaceful Labor March at Loane had four hundred
arrests at it. A group called the Midnight Special Legal
Collective stayed in DC to help everyone out, and activists
camped outside the jail for four or five days in
the pouring April rain, hiding under tarps. This is actually
also a very effective strategy, as if they mass arrest
(33:06):
your friends as you just camp outside the jail, it
puts a ton of pressure on the state to get
those people out sooner. As for what people faced in prison,
one group of prisoners wrote quote, we were denied contact
with our lawyers for consecutive periods of more than thirty
hours at a time, left handcuffed and shackled for up
(33:28):
to eight hours, moved up to ten times from holding
cell to holding cell. Many of us were denied food
for more than thirty hours and denied water for up
to ten hours at a time, though many of us
were soaking wet after Monday's protest, we were refused dry
clothing and left shackled and shivering on very cold floors
for no apparent reasons. Some of us were physically attacked
(33:51):
by US marshals. We were forcefully thrown up against the wall,
pepper sprayed directly in the face, or thrown on the
floor and beaten. At least two individuals were forced against
the wall by their necks and strangulation holds. About one
hundred and fifty of the arrested people practice jail solidarity,
which is where you refuse to identify yourself, which helped
(34:13):
force the state to drop everyone's misdemeanors to a five
dollars violation. Basically, you make certain demands like we're not
going to give you our names until you know, treat
us the following way, and don't single people out, and
all this kind of stuff. And these arrests, when I
say that they were unlawful, we know that because six
(34:35):
hundred and eighty people eventually won a lawsuit for about
thirteen million dollars against DC cops for illegal arrests. There's
an awful lot of people I know who own houses
in the Rust Belt because of their settlements from alter
globalization RA protests. Not me. I lost my lawsuit, but
I'll talk about that some other time. And so, yeah,
(34:59):
Seattle was a big coming out party for the movement,
but April sixteenth brought in so so many more people
and it opened up new conversations. Before Seattle, everyone had
assumed that nonviolence was the only way to do things.
But as the movement kicked in and people saw people
push the police back from peaceful protesters by wielding a
(35:20):
chain link fence. People started thinking about things differently, and
the global movement was also you know global. And as
for what happened next, I'll talk about that soon, but
for now I'll talk about this isn't a pivot to ads,
although there is always the ads at the end of
the show, which is honestly why sometimes I stopped listening
(35:41):
during the plugs. But you shouldn't. You should listen to
my plugs. They're like mini ads, but they're for me.
I have a substack. I talk about a lot of stuff.
On my substack. I often talk more about the things
that I'm talking about on this show, and like just recently,
I posted one about how I've quote de escalate all
(36:01):
conflict that isn't with the enemy that I really believe in,
and it gets misused a lot, and I get sad
about that, and so I talk about some of its
misuse and what counts as the enemy. So if you
want to know who Margaret Kiljoy defines as an enemy,
you're gonna have to go over to my substack. And
the answer is a little bit that it should be
fewer people, and sometimes it's not because I'm grouching anyway,
(36:24):
I'll talk to you all soon, and I hope you're
doing as well as you can. Bye. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media.
The more podcasts and Cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the far
Medio app, pp A Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that whenever there's
bad things happening in the world, there's people trying to do
good things. And I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and this
week I would also say that this is the podcast
I record. Well, I have a cold and I'm sleepy
because I just woke up and I'm about to drive
(00:23):
for like fourteen hours. But that's okay. And what you
might have noticed is that it is not Wednesday, but
in fact Monday. Well it's actually whatever day of the
week you listen to this, but if you listen to
it on the day it comes out, it's Monday, not Wednesday.
And yet I left you recently with a cliffhanger saying
(00:45):
that I would talk to you on Wednesday, and here
it is a Monday. And all that is to say,
this episode came out late, and for that I apologize.
Some people I care about and had to deal with
some hard things in rapid secession, and then I went
and got sick in the middle of that. And everyone
(01:05):
is as okay as could be given the circumstances. And
here I am back at work talking into a microphone
while sleepy as sick. I'm not supposed to tell you
I'm sleepy. I'm high energy. Welcome to First Thing in
the Morning with Margaret Kiljoy. I think that's what I'm
supposed to do. I am telling you the story of
the alter Globalization movement right now as best as I can,
(01:28):
and I'll probably start interjecting my own story into it
soon here and there, because, as I've probably said at nauseum,
this is the movement that radicalized me. Where we last
left our nameless heroes, they'd built up people's global action
out of the encounters called for by the Zapatistas. They'd
had a sort of trailer episode for the alter globalization
(01:50):
movement in London with the Carnival against Capitalism. Then, as
we covered in some earlier episodes, the big entrance to
the global stage happened in November nineteen ninety nine, the
famed Battle of Seattle, which happened in well, you guessed it, Seattle.
After Seattle, activists were like, oh, fuck, yeah, okay, let's
(02:10):
do the next big thing. And the answer to what
the next big thing was was that the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank were meeting in April two
thousand in Washington, DC. And I have talked a lot
about the IMF and the World Bank on this show
a couple months ago during my home Why Neoliberalism Is
(02:31):
Bad episodes. But the shortest version is that the IMF
and the World Bank are very very similar institutions that
both lend money at predatory rates to developing countries, and basically,
after they loan you some money, they demand that those
countries adopt structural adjustment programs, which got the environmental legislation
(02:53):
and labor rights of those countries in order for those
countries to repay the interest on those loans. And it
basically traps into predatory situations and takes all of the
money from the poor people and gives it to the
rich people, and just does all of the things that
capitalism does, but just at like this wild frantic pace.
(03:14):
It's kind of like if an entire country borrowed money
from organized crime and then the mafia was like, all right,
now you're going to restructure your entire life to pay
us back. Like if you've ever seen a crime movie
where the crime man is stuck doing the dirty work
for the bosses because he owes them more money than
he can ever earn back. Oh, what was the recent one.
(03:35):
There's a really good Pedro Pescal killing Nazis movie that
came out recently that was super kind of indie that
I think got into this stuff. Unless I'm getting my
movies mixed up, which happens more than I would like anyway. Okay,
So a movie like that, crime man is stuck doing
the dirty work for the bosses because he owes them
(03:55):
money that he can ever pay back. That is what
the IMF in the World Bank or up to, at
least according to the activist position, the ANTIIMF and World
Bank position, which is a position that I think is
a reasonable analysis of the situation. So the IMF and
the World Bank were meeting up in DC and protesters
(04:16):
were like, well, we were already planning. Like I was
going to say, like after Seattle, they were like, what's next,
and they would go and do this thing. And that's true,
but they were already planning this as well, and they
were like, all right, we're going to do this thing
in April after Seattle. It just that after Seattle there
was just so so much more energy for that to happen,
(04:39):
so much more inertia because people had actually protested the
IMF meetings in DC the year before, actually the day
of that Carnival against Capitalism that we talked about a
couple weeks ago, that was a much bigger deal in London.
And the reason we didn't talk about the DC version
of it is that it was like fifty people holding
(05:01):
signs and marching around and they briefly tried to get
into the street. And I mean, those protests happen every
single day all over the world, and we don't usually
cover them. Sorry, fifty person protests. I certainly have organized
more than my share of those, but they don't get
(05:21):
cool people did cool stuff episodes. Although that said, fifty
people can accomplish an awful lot. It's just when you're
at the like, you know, I wish this was a
bigger protest stage. You're usually not getting that much done.
But that I'd been nineteen ninety nine. Now it's a
new millennium. It is the year two thousand. Oh my god,
(05:42):
do you remember when people argued about whether it was
two thousand or two thousand and one that was the
new millennium? What a terrible argument I have. My position.
My position is that Pluto is a planet, and bronosauruses
are real, and the year two thousand is the new
millennium because the number changed, it is the year two thousand.
It is the new millennium. And the wind is at
(06:05):
their back. Their collective back momentum was with them. The
organizers were organized. The way that you make these protests
happen is you don't just say, like, show up in DC,
let's go, everyone will just magically self organize. Calling for
a protest and then being like it'll just work is
(06:29):
like that magical thinking where some people of some genders
think that the dishes just wash themselves, or that the
stuff that they leave on the coffee table just disappears. No,
it takes work. Organizing is work. Also, you can't just
(06:50):
organize a protest based on the idea of everyone should
just make fun signs and wear silly hats and show up.
I mean you can, and you can get numb Muer's
that with that, you just can't change anything by doing that.
That's not how change works. You have to organize protests
(07:11):
that are disruptive. That's the idea of protests. So the
organizers organized, They organized their asses off the protests were
the result of spokes council meetings, which we talked about before.
It's where one person you have a big group and
you send one person to a spokes council to go
(07:31):
and make decisions collectively and or just share information and
come back and report back. The protests were the result
of spokes council meetings all over the country to determine
tactics and messaging and to coordinate everything. And they were
drawing upon a long legacy of activism. We're going to
talk about that in a second part of how the
(07:52):
movement spread, This Ulter globalization movement, Oh, I most did it.
I grew up calling it the anti globalization movement. I
just understand and retrospect why that was bad framing that
the media gave us and we probably shouldn't have embraced.
Part of how this movement spread is that anyone who
went to Seattle from this or that town, they would
(08:13):
go home and do a report back event. You know.
It was hard to get people out to Seattle, right,
and so you have big groups like DC. You had
this affinity group that was like, all right, we're sending
one person to Seattle, you know, but maybe you're from Toledo,
and you're like, all right, I went to Seattle and
you didn't get sent as part of an affinity group,
but you just like got your shit together, got on
(08:35):
a bus or a plane or whatever. I went to Seattle.
You come back and you just give a report back.
You put an event together, a physical, in person event,
and this is a model we should bring back. Someone
will just go and explain their experiences and this or
that social movement that happened elsewhere in a report back.
(08:57):
You don't have to be the anarchist speaker or whatever.
You know, you don't have to be some special person.
You just need to have done a thing and then
want to tell your friends about it. I mean, it's
the equivalent of like when the people would go on
vacation and have put together slide shows in there. Maybe
you all are old enough to remember people doing that,
(09:18):
Maybe you're not. That's the thing people used to do.
I remember, early on in my activism, I was in
Portland and I went to this report back at the
Red and Black Cafe, just an anarchist cafe. You can
probably guess by the name where some American anarchists had
spent the summer squatting in Barcelona, and what is that
(09:38):
other than their vacation trip, right, But they came back
with photos and did a presentation discussing all the tactics
that people used there, and this just helps create an
international culture. If you're sitting somewhere in Portland, you haven't
left the country as an adult or maybe at all,
(10:00):
and someone is just saying to you, like, hey, this
is what our comrades are doing in Chile, this is
what our comrades are doing in Japan. You know that
is a good thing to do. And so yeah, after Seattle,
lots of people who couldn't go to Seattle went and
saw people from their own towns talk about what they
(10:22):
saw there and tell their stories and to just break
the idea of I don't know that you need to
be someone special to go do that. I hate to
get in my rocking chair and talk shit, but this
was probably a more effective recruitment tactic than just posting
about what you've done to Instagram. But do you know
(10:43):
what else is more effective than Instagram? Podcast ads? I
suspect they're more effective than Instagram ads. Actually I don't
know if that's true. Both of them are probably effective
what I usually do with Instagram ads. They're very good
at showing me things that it looked like the things
that I want to buy, and then I just google
that product plus Reddit and then I read the Reddit
(11:03):
reviews where they're like, that's a fake product, this is garbage.
Don't buy that weird dress. And then I don't buy
the weird dress, and then I don't have the articles
of my clothing in my closet that are left over
from before I did that that I never wear. But
here's our ads and we're back, okay. Although the ultra
(11:26):
globalization movement itself was very international and people were coming
from all over and it's spread all over the place,
and I'm sure I will be doing episodes specifically talking
about like the South Korean farmers and all of these
movements that were happening elsewhere in the world. Each local
area had its own protest culture. You throw a protest
(11:47):
in Seattle, you're going to get the Seattle people on
some level and the West Coast people on some level, right,
which means you're going to get fucking environmentalists. I say this,
I mean spent a lot of time as a West
Coast environment the East Coast activists came from a slightly
different lineage. Folks were coming out of all sorts of campaigns,
(12:08):
like the anti apartheid movement that was pushing countries to
divest from apartheid South Africa. The support movement for Leonard
Peltier was a big part of it. Leonard Peltier is
an American Indian movement activist we've talked about on this
show who spent decades upon decades in prison and as
a result of being accused of shooting and killing a
(12:31):
federal agent who was rating a reservation. Even though other
people admitted to doing that crime and got off on
self defense, he spent most of his life in prison
and that's not great, and so people were trying to
work to support him. There was also the support movement
for Mumia Abu Jamal we haven't covered on this show yet.
(12:53):
He's on the cover of people I will be talking
about on this show. Mumiya is a black journalist who
has been in prison since nineteen eighty two and he
spent much of that time on death row. His sentence
was later changed to life without parole. He's convicted of
killing a cop in Philly, a cop who had shot
him and nearly killed him. And this is another moment
(13:15):
of a black man being in prison for the crime
of refusing to die. He also maintains his innocence that
he didn't shoot that police officer at all, and that's
completely possible, and you know what, I would be supporting
him either way. It's okay for people to refuse to
die when the state wants to kill you. His supporters
(13:35):
generally argue that the reason he was framed was that
he worked as a journalist who investigated the police, and
in particular he was associated with the move movement in Philly,
which is a whole different story I need to tell
you one day. But if you ever think to yourself,
I wonder if the police have ever firebombed a neighborhood
in the US from a helicopter, destroying sixty five houses
(13:57):
just because of some Black power activists and killed a
lot of children in a way that is oddly reminiscent
of the Waco Siege, yet doesn't get talked about because
it wasn't right wing white people. The answer is yes,
and you should look up the move bombing of nineteen
eighty five if you want to be angry at the government.
Mumiya supported those folks. He supported them before the bombing.
(14:20):
They were being targeted a lot before the bombing as well.
Mumia was in prison the time of up. The reason
that Mumia was moved from death row and given life
in prison was that there was and is a massive
movement supporting him, a movement that has continued for decades.
For example, in nineteen ninety five, when the execution timeline
(14:43):
was moved up to kill Mumia sooner, protests kicked off
across the country, and Mumia protests were often spicy affairs,
as are frankly most protest parches that accomplish anything. There
was a torchlit march and I think San Francisco, but
it might have been the East Bay. I have somehow
moved between the two. I just read both and whatever.
(15:04):
There was a torchlit march in nineteen ninety five where
people barricaded the streets and all these folks from food
out bombs and the Chicano Youth Center. I think often
the same people were fighting against cops who are throwing
concussion grenades and all that shit. In nineteen ninety nine,
on April twenty fourth, there was a millions from Mamea March,
one of the first black bloc protests in the US,
(15:25):
and a lot of East Coast activists were coming out
of support for Mameia for support for move for support
for the American Indian movement, the anti apartheid movement, and
they also came out of punk. We've talked a lot
about the anarcho punk movement in the UK, especially when
we talked about bands like Crass and Tumbawamba and how
(15:46):
that movement was an actual counterculture and how it had
actual real world impacts on the political and cultural landscape
of England and the world. And we've talked a little
bit about punk in the US during the eighties. You
can go back and listen to our episodes about Anti
Racist Action, which was the group that kind of dealt
successfully dealt with the Nazi punk problem. But we haven't
(16:08):
talked as much about US punk and politics yet more broadly,
and it'll probably get its own episodes. But I'm gonna
do a little side quest real quick. Hardcore punk, which
is not just people who are really into punk, but
a specific subgenre of punk that I frankly don't like
as much as the other subgenres. I feel really bad.
(16:30):
I have this friend who's a singer of a hardcore band,
and at one point he was like, Magpie, do you
like my band? And I was like, it's all right,
but I don't really like hardcore all that much. And
he looks at me and he goes, well, what don't
you like about hardcore? And I looked at him and
I decided to be honest, and I was like, the vocals.
I don't like the vocals. This is not a way
(16:52):
to endear yourself to your friend who's the vocalist of
a hardcore band. I have since learned, Sorry, my friend,
if you're listening, I actually like your band. I just
am not a huge hardcore fan. Whatever. Hardcore in many
ways developed. A lot of it comes out of DC,
and hardcore is a cool and interesting scene. It has
(17:13):
always been very political. One source I use all the
time on this show, including this week, is the anarchist
news and analysis group crime Think, who've been around since
the nineties, and they're closely fafiliated with the anarchist hardcore scene,
especially in their early development. Because that's the thing is
that punk was among the other was among the groups
(17:38):
that kept anarchism and certain types of anti authoritarian leftism
alive during a period when not as many groups were
keeping that alive. Anyway, I just saw the Crime Think
published band Catharsis play a show like two weeks ago,
and they have such good political banter. They're up there
(17:59):
reminding everyone that the point of the music isn't just
emotional release, which is ironic to their name Catharsis, but
to build community with one another so that people can
work together to challenge the police and the state. It's
good shit, and they have a new album out and
I actually really like their new music. I take it
all back. I'm a fan anyway. Hardcore punk has a
(18:20):
fuck ton of roots in DC, especially in the eighties
and nineties. Straight edge culture comes out of hardcore punk.
You've got Minor Threat and there's Fugazi and shit who
are like always keeping it real about making sure that
music is anti capitalist, and you've got a bunch of
people doing activism in DC built around hardcore punk and
also Riot Girl under the banner positive Force. I think
(18:45):
this is where posi punk comes from, but I'm not
sure which is like punk but positive. I'm such a hater.
I'm so sorry everyone. It's not a political judgment at all.
I'm just a weird old goth and I used to
be a young, weird goth. I once went to a
Positive Youth fest in DC and felt ancient when I
(19:07):
was like twenty four and there were people giving each
other jumping double high fives in the pit, and that's
actually really cool. It was a cool thing to witness.
I just didn't feel like I was part of it.
I feel a little outside of when I was twenty four,
I was feeling a little outside of POSI life. Positive
Force threw punk shows that were all ages and sober,
(19:28):
and every show was a fundraiser for anarchists and progressive causes.
All sorts of bands, famous and forgotten alike played Positive
Force fundraisers. Fugazi headlined like fifty shows for them, Bikini
Killed played shows for them, Dave Grohl played shows for
them before his Nirvana era. And you'll be proud of
me for not doing a long aside here about my
(19:49):
theory that Kurt Cobain was an anarchist and probably well,
I hate to transvestigate super hard, I just like Kurt.
Positive Force was also a big part of the riot
girl scene. Like mostly it gets talked about from a
hardcore scene point of view, but a lot of the
idea of women being like, no, we're going to do
(20:10):
some separate organizing within this larger structure, and you're just
going to put up with that, which was an important
part of social movements. A lot of that comes out
of the riot girl scene, and some of it comes
out of Positive Force. So you've got these people throwing shows,
and at all these shows, people are talking about political issues.
(20:31):
There's free literature everywhere, and it radicalized just a ton
of people. As of ten years ago. I read an
article from twenty fifteen. The Collective is still around, though
they were gentrified out of their collective house in the
year two thousand. Anyway, Positive Force was a big part
of the DC organizing scene as well. So you have
this like really positive take on punk and anarchism. And
(20:55):
I think that that I'm now conjecturing, I'm now doing original,
not really search putting together my own dots. I think
the fact that it's this positive punk scene is a
big part about why well the Black Block in particular
behave the way it did during DC. And I don't
know that that's I'm just guessing now. One youth that
(21:19):
Positive Force did not recruit was a young Margaret Killjoy.
I grew up roughly in the DC area. I don't
want to say too much more specifically than that, because
they all are parasocial. Sometimes I love you Sometimes. I
didn't go to these protests because they sounded sort of
nonsensical to me based on what I'd seen in the media.
(21:41):
This is not speaking well of me this particular part.
What didn't help me is that the most radical kid
in my friend group, who blasted rage against the machine
all the time, his mom worked for the IMF, and
he told us that the IMF was good. Actually, so
I didn't go to the A sixteen protests. The main
group organizing the A sixteen protests have I mentioned that
(22:05):
I hate this method of naming protests enough, Yet they
were to happen on April sixteenth, so they were called
A sixteen in a long lineage of naming method that
annoys Margaret. The main organizing group was this coalition called
Mobilization for Global Justice. It was a big coalition, not
a single group, and it brought together unions, NGOs and
(22:27):
scrappier more DIY and anarchic activists. There was understandably a
tension between these groups, but sometimes that tension is what
produced the most beautiful results. You've got the dropout anarchists
who are sometimes some of them are the summit hoppers
who would like ride freight trains and live in squats
(22:49):
and eat out of dumpsters and do a ton of organizing.
They weren't just there for a good time. The idea
is that you don't need a full time job if
you eat and live outside, so you can dedicate yourself
to unpaid activism. This is in contrast to the professional
activists who worked for NGOs and would fly to protests
(23:12):
and collect a paycheck for organizing. And both sides of
this debate or way of living whatever they sometimes got
along and sometimes thought the other was full of shit.
The professional activists were called helicopter activists or swoopers for
showing up from California or wherever and telling locals how
to do things. There was endless critiques of the traveler kids,
(23:37):
the broke ones, the summit hoppers, and how they would
drain local resources and not give enough back. I have
a lot of thoughts about this dichotomy but mostly I
think that discourse and its consequences have been a disaster
for the human race. I think that people just do
things differently, and it's okay to be critical of each other,
but it's also better to figure out what our mutual
(23:59):
strengths are and how we can encourage each other to
play to our strengths Together. All these disparate activists put
on trainings and recruited people and did consensus based organizing
across the country to bring people together to shut down
the IMF and the World Bank. They called for a
whole week of protests. Another reason that calling at a
(24:21):
sixteen is nonsensical is that it was a whole week,
and more or less they were like, all right, let's
do what worked in Seattle, you know, specifically this idea
of organizing where everyone was going to break into affinity
groups that were going to organize into clusters and people
would pick different intersections and things like that to shut
down the IMF. From a grand strategy point of view,
(24:41):
these protests were very successful. From the immediate strategy point
of view of shutting down the IMF meeting, they were
not as successful. Activists did another newspaper rap where you
print up a fake front page of a newspaper and
then go around and put it on the newspapers and
the boxes and the stands. They did this at like
four in the morning one night, probably dozens of people
(25:03):
I don't actually know, because they wrapped twenty thousand copies
of the Washington Post to talk about the IMF. Crews
went out night after night to wheat paste anti IMF
flyers all over town. And this is a good example
of the solidarity between NGOs and the scrappy air activists
because the material costs for these things was paid for
(25:23):
by someone who presumably had an organization's funds behind them,
but probably not all of the people doing this were
professional activists. Folks set up a convergence center with a
garage area for giant puppet assembly. See our episodes about
bread and Puppet for lots about giant puppets. Churches opened
(25:44):
up their doors for protesters to sleep on the floor.
This is another thing that people are like. There's always
been solidarity between religious activists and non religious activists, at
least as long as I've been involved in anything, and
that gets forgotten about all the time I've slept on
some church floors. Marching bands showed up. Radical cheerleading squads
(26:05):
were there with pom poms and cheers. Food not Bombs
set up a flying brigade passing out food from shopping
carts to protesters. Indie media was there, The National Lawyer's
Guild was there. Everyone we've been talking about was there. Everyone,
but Margaret, I don't have FOMO. I don't know what
you're talking about. On Saturday, April fifteenth, the day before
(26:25):
the big day of action, police shut down the Convergon Space.
They also arrested. Look, I read a report that says
they arrested thirteen hundred and fifty people that day on
the fifteenth, in a rain of tear gas and pepper spray.
But I suspect that's conflating with the next day. They
certainly arrested a bunch of people on the fifteenth. I
(26:47):
just couldn't tell you about the numbers on the level
of research that I was able to do this week.
But yeah, they came and they shut down the Conversion space.
But you know what, the cops can't shut down. In fact,
you know what, the cops don't even want to shut
down advertising. That's right. Advertising. This podcast is brought to
(27:09):
you by advertising, and we're back. So this still didn't
stop the protests. All of these arrests as more people
flooded into the city for the big day. Not me.
I went into the city that day, but I went
to go to a youth pride festival that was entirely unrelated,
(27:33):
And while I was on the subway, a woman dressed
up like a fairy asked me if me and my
friends were going to the protests against the IMF. I asked,
what's the IMF and she said basically, they loan money
to developing countries and it's bad. And I was like, yeah, whatever, lady.
It took me two more years before I joined the movement.
This is not actually the person dressed up like a
(27:54):
fairy's fault, but she probably could have had her talking
points down a little better. I've probably met her since.
If you're listening person dressed up like a fairy at
a sixteen who tried to convince some kids on the subway.
Sorry anyway, twenty thousand people were there, at least tons
(28:16):
of people locked down in intersections, once again hoping to
shut down enough of DC to prevent the meetings from happening. Again.
This wasn't as successful this time from that point of view.
After getting their asses kicked in Seattle, people wore more
padding and armor. I read one story about a protester
getting his junk run over by a police scooter and
(28:37):
the reason that his junk survived as he was wearing
a cup. Critical mass was there, which are bike protesters.
They were kind of everywhere. Many of them were arrested
for riding bikes on city streets. Comms teams went around
with year two thousand era cell phones and lots of radios,
helping everyone know what was happening. And the Black Block
(29:00):
picked a different tactic this time. Rather than roving to
break things while the police were sort of busy elsewhere,
they kind of inverted that idea. A spokes council of
several hundred Black Block folks agreed that the block would
work more actively in solidarity with the lockdowns. They would
look to draw police away from the more vulnerable people.
(29:23):
To quote one lockdowner, Leela from an oral history that
I'll link to in the show notes put together by
Crime Think quote, I'd seen police violence previously, and I'm
familiar with police violence that's worse than this but I'd
never before seen police walk into a crowd of people
and slug people like that, just with abandon. The Black
(29:44):
Block came at that moment when blood was streaming down
people's faces and essentially pushed the police out of our intersection.
They were just this wall of bodies that pushed them
out and saved our intersection from any further police abuse.
I've forever been grateful to that Black Block for hearing
on the walkie talkies that we needed help and coming
(30:05):
so powerfully to our aid. And I think about that
all the time. I think about the sort of heroic
mode of the Black Block, and I think about, well,
nothing gets to me more than moments of solidarity like this.
You're thinking, Margaret, can you turn this into a Lord
of the Rings reference? I can. I think of the
(30:28):
Ride of the Rohim when the people of Rohan come
to Gondor in their moment of aid. That's what I
think about. And the Block, instead of being on horseback
with swords, they were like behind entire chain link fences.
There's photos of this. They went to a construction site
and they pulled up these like huge chunks of chain
(30:50):
link fence and we're just charging police lines to push
them back. A participant talked about their strategy that they
didn't want to do what they'd done in Seattle again,
but that also quote, we're not going to get voluntarily arrested,
or we're not going to sit in the street while
they put pepper spray in her eyes. We are going
to fight back against police abuse if needed end quote.
(31:14):
The strategy of shutting down the meeting didn't work, not
like it had in Seattle. Most people realized that early
on that it wasn't going to work, but decided they
were going to make such a fuss that the whole
thing would draw endless attention to the IMF and its horrors,
and people did block delegates wherever they could, and again,
on a grand strategy level, this was a very successful protest.
(31:35):
The police just attacked wherever and however they wanted, just
wading in and smashing people in the face with batons
and shit. They ran people over with police scooters, and
the street medics had their work cut out for them.
Many of the lockdowns and many intersections lasted all day.
At the end of the day, the way that they
got the lock boxes out and then disappeared into the
(31:56):
crowd to not get arrested. Was that when a mark
came by with like giant banners and puppets and shit,
they were like, hey, come over here, and then they
like kind of disassembled everything and smuggled it out in
the crowd. And that's pretty cool. And the police actually
did most of the work to shut down DC. That's
the other thing is like some people shut down a
few intersections, the police shut down way way more of DC.
(32:22):
Around twelve hundred people were arrested, or thousands of people
are arrested, or thirteen hundred and fifty people were arrested
on a fifteen alone. I don't know, and I'm really
annoyed that I don't know, because this is the kind
of information I used to track about every single protest
because my brain works a certain way. A lot of
people were arrested, at least twelve hundred. That's the lowest
number I've seen. Thousands. It is another number I've seen.
(32:45):
The Legal Peaceful Labor March at Loane had four hundred
arrests at it. A group called the Midnight Special Legal
Collective stayed in DC to help everyone out, and activists
camped outside the jail for four or five days in
the pouring April rain, hiding under tarps. This is actually
also a very effective strategy, as if they mass arrest
(33:06):
your friends as you just camp outside the jail, it
puts a ton of pressure on the state to get
those people out sooner. As for what people faced in prison,
one group of prisoners wrote quote, we were denied contact
with our lawyers for consecutive periods of more than thirty
hours at a time, left handcuffed and shackled for up
(33:28):
to eight hours, moved up to ten times from holding
cell to holding cell. Many of us were denied food
for more than thirty hours and denied water for up
to ten hours at a time, though many of us
were soaking wet after Monday's protest, we were refused dry
clothing and left shackled and shivering on very cold floors
for no apparent reasons. Some of us were physically attacked
(33:51):
by US marshals. We were forcefully thrown up against the wall,
pepper sprayed directly in the face, or thrown on the
floor and beaten. At least two individuals were forced against
the wall by their necks and strangulation holds. About one
hundred and fifty of the arrested people practice jail solidarity,
which is where you refuse to identify yourself, which helped
(34:13):
force the state to drop everyone's misdemeanors to a five
dollars violation. Basically, you make certain demands like we're not
going to give you our names until you know, treat
us the following way, and don't single people out, and
all this kind of stuff. And these arrests, when I
say that they were unlawful, we know that because six
(34:35):
hundred and eighty people eventually won a lawsuit for about
thirteen million dollars against DC cops for illegal arrests. There's
an awful lot of people I know who own houses
in the Rust Belt because of their settlements from alter
globalization RA protests. Not me. I lost my lawsuit, but
I'll talk about that some other time. And so, yeah,
(34:59):
Seattle was a big coming out party for the movement,
but April sixteenth brought in so so many more people
and it opened up new conversations. Before Seattle, everyone had
assumed that nonviolence was the only way to do things.
But as the movement kicked in and people saw people
push the police back from peaceful protesters by wielding a
(35:20):
chain link fence. People started thinking about things differently, and
the global movement was also you know global. And as
for what happened next, I'll talk about that soon, but
for now I'll talk about this isn't a pivot to ads,
although there is always the ads at the end of
the show, which is honestly why sometimes I stopped listening
(35:41):
during the plugs. But you shouldn't. You should listen to
my plugs. They're like mini ads, but they're for me.
I have a substack. I talk about a lot of stuff.
On my substack. I often talk more about the things
that I'm talking about on this show, and like just recently,
I posted one about how I've quote de escalate all
(36:01):
conflict that isn't with the enemy that I really believe in,
and it gets misused a lot, and I get sad
about that, and so I talk about some of its
misuse and what counts as the enemy. So if you
want to know who Margaret Kiljoy defines as an enemy,
you're gonna have to go over to my substack. And
the answer is a little bit that it should be
fewer people, and sometimes it's not because I'm grouching anyway,
(36:24):
I'll talk to you all soon, and I hope you're
doing as well as you can. Bye. Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media.
The more podcasts and Cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foalzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the far
Medio app, pp A Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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