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Yesterday a group of the world's brightest economists and financial leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., for spring conference meetings at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Truly, these fiscal Cassandras were the only people who predicted the current global financial crisis.
No, wait, not those guys. My apologies! Above, you see the president of the World Bank with the German development minister and French financial minister. Rather, it was the economists below who anticipated capitalism's quick sunset.
They saw the writing on the wall, possibly because they spraypainted it there. But in this world, being right doesn't always mean not getting maced. So when the antiglobalization crowd showed up yesterday to protest the IMF/World Bank meetings, it didn't much matter that the markets themselves had done a pretty good job of showing that it's not all biscuits and gravy in the free world. They approached the "barricades" with the same joyless purpose as ever, that is, with the singular hope that some cop would brutalize them. And some cops obliged!
Photos from the revolution follow, with bonus pictures from a surprise aerobics rally.
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I'm confused. They are against capitalism but don't offer any alternative?
Clearly planned economies don't work. According to these morons, the free market doesn't work.
Maybe we should all go back to subsistence farming.
The truth is that capitalism works great as long as there are sufficient regulations in place to keep things in check.
Also, it is necessary to live within one's means. Americans don't know how to live within their means, therefore there are a lot of people in this country in financial trouble.
Maybe these 'protesters' should try talking to people who have lived in societies with planned economies to get an idea of disastrous such policies really are.
That's the fundamental problem for the anar-kiddies: once they've smashed the state, they don't have a program for what's supposed to replace it, apart from some vague communal system where everybody owns everybody else's collection of obscure vinyl LPs. Say what you want about lefty socialists, but at least they stand for something and are willing to work the system to achieve those aims. Got a friend who's a labor organizer for Baltimore public schools and he says there's always some anarchist contingent that latches onto "social justice" oriented protests. Real leftists can't stand them and want nothing to do with them. Whenever the "black bloc" kids show up, all the old school lefties are like, "Let the kids have their fun so they can go home."
I'm thinking they want something like Christiana in Copenhagen (pre 2004 "normalization"), where you are free to grow herb gardens, shoot heroin, and throw rocks at tourists.
I was in Christiania back in 2000. It was a very 'interesting' place. Kind of like a really dodgy shanty town with a bunch of stalls selling weed and hash.
I think Christiana was an interesting social experiment, but really the only reason a place such as Christiania could exist at all was that the gov't allowed free use of the land. If these protesters think the Christiania of old was a utopian dreamland I wish they would realize what a sketchy place it was.
Fuck those hippies. I'm tired of these idiots coming to our town and vandalizng our businesses every year.
Hey there Mr. out there on an island!
A very concrete set of alternatives was put forward this weekend. DCist may not have gotten a press release, but the information was very visibly available on the website of a group that was organizing much of the weekend's events.
On Saturday at St. Stephen's Church on 16th Street, a People's Economic Forum was held. The forum was organized as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank meetings and consisted of popular education on the economic system and presentations of very specific alternatives. Some of the program is available online at globaljusticeaction.org (the web server seems to be running slowly, probably due to heavy traffic) and video of the forum will be online shortly.
It also bears mentioning that alternatives to capitalism have been extensively developed and exist in an almost infinite number. They are all well documented and can be found online. Living in the United States it can be difficult to see an outside of the current world system, and individuals here can't be blamed for that nor should we find it surprising. But new ideas are definitely out there for us to debate.
"People's Economic Forum?" It's funny how readily you guys take on the "people's" mantle, considering how few people you actually represent.
You folks might get a little more traction if you resisted your desire to use Soviet-era terminology that sounded dated even in the 1970s, coupled with symbols that are overwhelmingly associated with stickers on suburban teenagers' skateboards across the nation.
Yeah. Next thing we know you will be calling the "United States of America" the Homeland!
Debate = Vandalism in Logan Circle Tied To World Bank Protesters?
Ok, let's take a glance at the "concrete set of alternatives," Explodo. Please provide us a link to some video of that panel discussion/confab, or some documents of same.
In the meantime, these folks are all about complaining and demonstrating and disrupting, and rarely about setting forth a vision. And one of the stars of your "People's Economic Forum," Cathy Milstein," has written the same complaint:
"libertarian anti-capitalists globally, are a long way from helping to turn the places they live into free cities in a free society. At least to date, it also appears that they have done little work, much less published thinking, on what a reconstructive vision might look like, as well as how to move toward it in their communities and this movement. Rather than just a Carnival against Capitalism, a carnival for something might have better provided the utopian thrust necessary to sustain and give direction to the difficult struggle ahead."
That solitary paragraph of logic came near the very end of an over-3,000 word diatribe of largely non-specific praise for disruption and other efforts towards "revolution."
I know it's hard to grasp, but you're just the flip side of the teabaggers coin. (Well, at least those malcontents know how to funnel their gibberish into, say, taking over a county commission, or getting their talking points before a state legislature.)
I return you to your revolution, playing now on a venture-capital-funded social networking website near you.
If you guys are interested in a substantive debate minus to the potshots and the ad hominems, there'll be a lot of people really excited to talk with you. But I'm pretty sure the comments page on a blog isn't the forum for this and that's just the nature of the medium.
One person above asked for video and as soon as people get the chance to breathe a bit, video will be available through our website, likely posted to Vimeo (first since the quality is better) and YouTube.
globaljusticeaction.org
Take care! :-)
Sorry, don't have time or interest to debate a group of people who are inconsequential except for occasionally tying up traffic and smashing a window or two. And it appears that your consequentiality is diminishing, given the ever smaller-size of your rallies. So I'll just continue to point out that y'all are trustafarian douches.
I think it's important that we not be dismissive of the intent and thoughtfulness and passion that many protestors bring against the system as they see it. My problem, Explodo, is with a few aspects of all this:
1. You and colleagues seem to avoid acknowledging that the vandalism was a mistake, esp. the random spray painting of cars, simply because they were parked in front of a Whole Foods. Guy who works at the hardware store snags a good parking spot, and his day's labor is rewarded with having his car vandalized, and you say nothing? That's your option, but it's a credibility sinker.
2. While people attending your workshop may want alternatives, the leaders of those confabs do not. They aren't Naomi Klein, arguing for political change. They're simply in favor of revolution. Take even a single good idea any of them may have, give them a strategy for political success, and see how far you get. They dream of smashing the system, not using it to affect change.
There has never been a more ripe time for a majority of Americans to consider alternatives, to see the harm in consumer gluttony, to want real work in their town's factories, to see the connections to the environmental crisis, and on and on.
But the folks running these protests and workshops? They won't do the real work, the hard work, of talking with Americans and motivating them to change via the process. Change things, please, but find a new team to do it.