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Notes from the People's Summit on Globalization
By Nell Geiser, WireTap
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The Summit took place in Boulder, Colorado and brought together participants and speakers from around the nation and the world. It was an introduction to the strategies and tactics of an incredibly diverse movement which is working against thousands of injustices and for thousands of visions of a more just world. It was also an opportunity for activists to remind ourselves that we are not alonein our cities, in our country, and even more importantly, on a global scale.
I am part of the Coalition for Economic Justice, a group of mostly college activist groups at Colorado University-Boulder that organized the Summit over a period of about six months. What follows is a diary of one of my days at the Summit, which I hope conveys both the breadth of topics addressed and the spirit of celebration and solidarity that infused the weekend.
7:30 AM
Arrival
The three days of the Summit are packed, so we're all up bright and early for the first set of workshops. I biked down to the university campus where the Summit is taking place to gather everyone who signed up for the tree-climbing workshop I'm helping to lead. Summit participants are stumbling to the registration table and filtering off from there to workshops like "Women's Rights as Global Rights," a non-violence training, and "Jobs With Soul: Above and Beyond the Corporate Treadmill."
8:00 AM
Tree Climbing
How does spending a couple years up in a tree, protecting it and the surrounding forests from chainsaws wielded by the likes of Pacific Lumber, sound to you? Well, participants in this morning's tree climbing workshop didn't have to sign up to be Julia Butterfly to learn the basics of how to do a tree-sit. The other trainers and I got to the trees early to set up a traverse between two trees and some ropes hanging from limbs for new climbers to presic (a rope-climbing technique) up the rope and rappel down. Luckily the weather is beautiful and unseasonably warm. The fifteen participants listened to the explanations of tree-sitting as a tactic, watched the demonstrations and safety-checks patiently, and then strapped themselves into harnesses, leaving the ground behind (at least for a few minutes). For most people, it was the first time they had put on a rock-climbing harness, and everyone had a great time getting up in the trees.
I worked with two women from Arizona as they made their way up and down the rope. We exchanged stories from the actions that we'd been involved in on Buy Nothing Day (the day after Thanksgivingthe biggest shopping day of the year) and discussed the logistics of banner drops and tree-sits. There are several active tree-sits going on right now in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, and they always need more people to reinforce support teams and take a turn up in the tree. [For more information on tree-sits as a direct action tactic, visit Earth First. For information on general direct action training, check out the Ruckus Society.]
10:30 AM
World Bank Boycott Workshop
What do you get when you put Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, Njoki Njehu, director of the Fifty Years Is Enough Network, a global coalition to abolish or radically transform the IMF and World Bank, and Carlos Zorrilla, an organizer from Ecuador who is working locally to kick out a World Bank mining project, together in a room? During the World Bank Boycott workshop, these three well-known activists brought the global economy to life by telling the stories of communities around the world that have been devastated by World Bank policies and projects. They also provided a way for people here in the United States to pressure the Bank in the tradition of the anti-apartheid movement, which successfully drove major corporations out of apartheid South Africa. The Boycott asks local City Councils and other institutions not to buy World Bank bonds in the future. The bonds provide 80% of the Bank's funding. Just think, if we could put the heat on those Washington bureaucrats by hurting their rating in the bond market (right now they have a triple "A" rating), they'd have to listen a lot more seriously to the concerns and demands of the global justice movement. Njoki Njehu explained that Jubilee 2000 South, part of the worldwide debt-cancellation movement, has endorsed the boycott campaign because it is working for necessary systemic change in how the global economy operates.
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2:00 PM
Making Trouble: Youth Agitate For Justice
Sometimes I ask myself when this disparate, semi-effective youth movement will ever get its shit together. But that question wasn't bothering me at all when I left the youth activism workshop that I facilitated this afternoon. Most of us left wondering not how we will get activism rolling, but when we will get together again to share all of the work we're doing. About thirty high school and college-age activists gathered at the workshop and discussed the ideals, as well as the nuts and bolts of youth organizing. Participants from around the Denver-metro area who hadn't met before talked about how we could better collaborate in our various campaigns.
Students from Thorton, a Denver suburb, told us about how their teacher, the sponsor of their Students For Justice group, had recently been fired for his political/activist approach to teaching. Student Worker, a high school activist student union from Boulder, talked about the protests they organized on the first day of statewide standardized tests this year. (Student scores from that test, the CSAP, will be used to assign every school in the state a letter grade as part of Republican Governor Bill Owens' school reform package.) After sharing the various campaigns we're working on, we brainstormed the challenges we face in mobilizing our peers and talked about what has been effective. We talked about the interconnections between student rights, globalization, the prison industrial complex, and other issues.
Once again, the conference reminded us that we can be much more powerful when we work together. As Kevin Danaher said, "People complain and ask, 'what can I do, I'm only one person?' Well, unless you're Siamese twins or you got a Multiple Personality Disorder, we're all only one person." That's why we have collective action, and that's one reason students have always been at the forefront of struggles for social justice. Youth are passing the word and organizing around the idea that globalization is a threat to our schools and our public space, and that globalization means we are living in a consumer-based world at the expense of the people who make our shoes and grow our coffee.
6:00 PM
Keynote Speeches
As usual at big conferences, we had a few airport crises and one of our keynote speakers couldn't make it because of a court date. Tonight, the biggest venue at the University was filled to hear Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's daily magazine, Democracy Now!, along with Jason Wallach of the Mexico Solidarity Network based in Chicago, Ignacio Ibarra of the Border Agricultural Workers Project on the U.S.-Mexican border, and Danny Kennedy, director of Project Underground, which works with indigenous communities around the world to fight oil, mining, and gas projects. The stories of oppressed communities, gathered from different continents, in different languages, and coming from different histories, add up to a coherent picture of globalization, not as the unstoppable force of nature that Clinton said it was, or the information superhighway writ large in every sector of society, but as a fucked up system of give and take: some people are doing all the giving, and some, although they go to any length to claim otherwise, are doing every bit of the taking.
Amy Goodman spoke about the vital role of democratic media in the movement, and the struggle she is facing at Pacifica, whose national management has lost sight of the idea of community radio upon which it was founded. Jason Wallach told us about the Zapatista mobilization happening that weekend in Mexico City. He spoke about how that movement is a touchstone for the struggle against modern-day imperialism around the world. Ignacio Ibarra recounted the stories of workers who have dealt with unsafe working conditions and union busting on both sides of the border, and who are now organizing more effectively than ever. And Danny Kennedy spoke about the devastation of land when oil is extracted for our massive consumption in the U.S. He explained that the U'wa indigenous people in Colombia believe that oil is the blood of the earth, and so they have put their lives on the line, threatening mass suicide, as Occidental Petroleum continues its plan to bleed the earth and enrich their corporate coffers.
10:30 PM
Hip Hop Show
Tonight after the keynotes, some local B-Boys and slam poets took the stage. I laughed as I saw a large percentage of my high school stream in for the show, while fewer than ten had showed up for the keynotes. When kids get to see their friends breaking, that's going to be a bigger draw than listening to a lecture any day. But hey, that's what the movement is all about: it's about building more than a political resistance, but a global culture of resistance. The words of the poets, and the beat and rhyme of hip hop are just as much about globalizing liberation and resisting corporate rule as are tree-sits and boycotts and student activist clubs.
All three days of the People's Summit on Globalization were full of workshops, panels, and keynotes. People came from around the country to learn everything from how to blockade the streets during mass protests to the ins and outs of free trade agreements. Lots of participants were surprised that the whole Summit had been organized by college students with some help from community activists.
As a high school student, I always like blowing the perception that we all happily wear our Abercrombie and Fitch uniform and are content to relinquish our role as citizens for that of consumer. That archetype is not as dominant as fatalist adults imagine, because many of us are simply not content to give up our culture and our power to the corporate cowboys of globalization.
When we gather to learn and organize and when we gather on the streets of Quebec City in a couple weeks outside a very different sort of Summit of the Americas, where heads of state will meet to implement the Free Trade Area of the Americas (see www.stopftaa.org or www.a20.org) we are seeing this youth-powered movement for democracy and justice germinate into a global force to be reckoned with.
Links:
- Earth First
- Ruckus Society
- World Bank Bond Boycott
- Reclaim Pacifica Radio
- Zapatista National Liberation Army
- Border Agricultural Workers Project
- Project Underground
- Mobilization in Quebec against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) www.stopftaa.org & www.a20.org