Tomgram

Rebecca Solnit, Tank Girl in Miami

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I used to think that, as with what Chalmers Johnson calls its “empire of bases,” the United States was developing a new form of militarism, unlike every past example, in which you could walk the streets of our cities forever without seeing anyone in a military uniform. That, of course, began to change after 9/11. Now, from airports to subways, not to speak of demonstrations, it’s become quite normal to spot well-armed soldiers. As Rebecca Solnit suggests in her vivid report below on the FTAA demonstrations in Miami, in the face of protest there’s a creeping militarization of whole cityscapes. Along with that goes a version of the “bubble” effect of presidential visits abroad — the shutting down of vast central city areas to protect our head of state. The two paradigmatic responses of our moment, in fact, seem to be “war” in metaphor and reality and this shut-down effect which buttons up all life for “protection.”

Just a day or two ago, Newsmax.com, evidently a conservative website, released quotes from an interview the magazine Cigar Aficionado was granted with former Centcom commander General Tommy Franks in which he speculated on what might happen after a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack on the United States:

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”

Comments the website: “He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.” It’s interesting, of course, that such extreme scenarios are running around the brain of the general who oversaw our war in Iraq. At a more mundane level, another kind of militarization of our society is taking place as the Pentagon moves slowly on a host of fronts to blur the lines between civilian and military. With its mountainous $400 billion budget, of course, it is competing to become the agency of choice for just about everything — from war to peace, foreign intelligence to domestic surveillance.

On Sunday, William M. Arkin, the sober military analyst for the Los Angeles Times began an important piece, Mission Creep Hits Home, this way:

“Preoccupied with the war in Iraq and still traumatized by Sept. 11, 2001, the American public has paid little attention to some of what is being done inside the United States in the name of anti-terrorism. Under the banner of ‘homeland security,’ the military and intelligence communities are implementing far-reaching changes that blur the lines between terrorism and other kinds of crises and will break down long-established barriers to military action and surveillance within the U.S.

“‘We must start thinking differently,’ says Air Force Gen. Ralph E. ‘Ed’ Eberhart, the newly installed commander of Northern Command, the military’s homeland security arm. Before 9/11, he says, the military and intelligence systems were focused on ‘the away game’ and not properly focused on ‘the home game.’ ‘Home,’ of course, is the United States.”

Comments the website: “He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.” It’s interesting, of course, that such extreme scenarios are running around the brain of the general who oversaw our war in Iraq. At a more mundane level, another kind of militarization of our society is taking place as the Pentagon moves slowly on a host of fronts to blur the lines between civilian and military. With its mountainous $400 billion budget, of course, it is competing to become the agency of choice for just about everything — from war to peace, foreign intelligence to domestic surveillance.

On Sunday, William M. Arkin, the sober military analyst for the Los Angeles Times began an important piece, Mission Creep Hits Home, this way:

“Preoccupied with the war in Iraq and still traumatized by Sept. 11, 2001, the American public has paid little attention to some of what is being done inside the United States in the name of anti-terrorism. Under the banner of ‘homeland security,’ the military and intelligence communities are implementing far-reaching changes that blur the lines between terrorism and other kinds of crises and will break down long-established barriers to military action and surveillance within the U.S.

“‘We must start thinking differently,’ says Air Force Gen. Ralph E. ‘Ed’ Eberhart, the newly installed commander of Northern Command, the military’s homeland security arm. Before 9/11, he says, the military and intelligence systems were focused on ‘the away game’ and not properly focused on ‘the home game.’ ‘Home,’ of course, is the United States.”

The military, it turns out, is heading into the domestic counterintelligence business and into — welcome home, John Poindexter — the “data mining” business as well (that is, information about you). Arkin comments: “And it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling ‘actionable intelligence’ will slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the ‘data mine.'”

Consider, then, Rebecca Solnit’s experience in Miami and wonder whether she indeed did step into one future – not necessarily the only possible one – that faces us all. Tom

Fragments of the Future:
The FTAA in Miami

By Rebecca Solnit

The future was being modeled on both sides of the massive steel fence
erected around the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami last
Thursday. Inside, delegates from every nation in the western hemisphere
but Cuba watered down some portions of the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) agreement and postponed deciding on others in an
attempt to prevent a failure as stark as that of the World Trade
Organization ministerial in Cancun two months before. Outside, an army
of 2,500 police in full armor used a broad arsenal of weapons against
thousands of demonstrators and their constitutional rights. “Not every
day do you get tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and hit in the face,” said
Starhawk, a prominent figure in the global anticapitalism movement,,
who experienced all three Thursday.

Since the Seattle surprise of 1999, it has become standard procedure to
erect a miniature police state around globalization summits, and
it’s hard not to read these rights-free zones as prefigurations of what
full-blown corporate globalization might bring. After all, this form of
globalization would essentially suspend local, regional, and national
rights of self-determination over labor, environmental, and
agricultural conditions in the name of the dubious benefits of the free
market, benefits that would be enforced by unaccountable transnational
authorities acting primarily to protect the rights of capital. At a
labor forum held the day before the major actions, Dave Bevard, a
laid-off union metalworker, referred to this new world order as
“government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the
corporations.”

The corporate agenda of NAFTA and related globalization treaties is
demonstrated most famously by the case of MTBE, a gasoline additive
that causes severe damage to human health and the environment. When
California phased it out, the Canadian corporation Methanex filed a lawsuit
demanding nearly a billion dollars in compensation from the US
government for profit lost because of the ban. Under NAFTA rules,
corporations have an absolute right to profit with which local laws
must not interfere. Poisoning the well is no longer a crime; stopping
the free flow of poison is.

The FTAA, modeled after NAFTA, was originally intended to create a
borderless trade zone that would encompass the whole hemisphere (except,
of course, for Cuba). That globalization is an economic disaster for
many existing industries is so apparent that, while paying lip service
to a borderless economy, both Presidents Clinton and Bush have
attempted to protect the US steel industry from cheap foreign imports,
though neither has done anything about the export of former union jobs
to the maquilladoras of Mexico (and now those jobs are fleeing Mexico
for yet cheaper venues in the infamous “race to the bottom,” while more
and more white-collar US jobs, from programming to data processing, are
also being exported).

And it’s the fact that even the richest nations — the United States and
the European Union — won’t live up to their own rhetoric of capitalism
without borders that trips up the globalization agendas they pursue.
Both maintain high agricultural subsidies that undermine the ability of
poorer nations to generate export-crop income or in some cases — as with
corn in Mexico — even to compete successfully domestically. NAFTA, which
will be a decade old this New Year’s, devastated hundreds of thousands
of Mexican subsistence farmers. Florida’s citrus industry would be
devastated by tariff-free Brazilian imports, and small Kentucky tobacco
farmers are going out of business because of developing-world imports
of the crop. The question now is not whether globalized commodities are
profitable but who profits, and the answer is usually the already rich,
while the rest get poorer.

The Clinton administration genuinely believed in the corporate
internationalism that the word ‘globalization’ stands for, and the FTAA
talks were first launched by Clinton nine years ago. If there’s one
thing to be grateful to the Bush junta for, it’s their commitment to a
narrowly defined national self-interest that makes their pursuit of
globalization pretty indistinguishable from old-fashioned colonialism:
you open your borders to our products and principles, perhaps after a
little arm-twisting, and then we’ll pretty much do whatever we want.
This is much the same screw-the-world-community policy that made Bush
and Co. disregard the UN Security Council and world opinion to pursue
the current war in Iraq with only a few allies. The solution to the
collapse in Cancun and stalemate in Miami will be pursuit of a
similarly splintering agenda — bilateral trade agreements, mostly with
nations the US can bully. As the WTO was collapsing, the US was already
turning to the FTAA, and as it becomes evident that the FTAA would
flop, the US has stepped up its pursuit of bilateral trade agreements
with Latin American, southern African and other nations.

Cancun was a watershed victory because more than twenty nations in the
global south, led by Brazil, stood up to the US and the EU, urged on by
the activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which were
part of the continuum of conversation there. In Miami there was no such
continuum and no exhilarating victory, but there is room enough for
those who oppose corporate globalization to continue resisting it. The
FTAA conference dissolved a day early, having only achieved what has
been dubbed “FTAA lite.” This version allows member nations to withdraw
from specific aspects of the FTAA agreement and otherwise weakens its
impact. Brazil, the economic giant in the south, had objected to two
provisions: protection of foreign investment and intellectual property
rules; FTAA lite let Brazil win on those fronts. As Lori Wallach of the
NGO Public Citizen put it, “All that was agreed was to scale back the
FTAA’s scope and punt all of the hard decisions to an undefined future
venue so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of the FTAA.”

The war at home

It’s popular to say that corporate globalization is war by other means,
but what went down in Miami during the FTAA skipped the part about
other means. And though it was most directly–thanks to clubs, pellet
guns, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and other weapons–an
assault on the bodies of protestors, it was first an assault against the
right of the people peaceably to assemble and other first amendment
rights, a dramatic example of how hallowed American rights are being
dismantled in the name of the war on terrorism.

For months beforehand, Police Chief John Timoney — engineer of the coup
against constitutional rights at the 2000 Republican National
Convention when he headed Philadelphia’s police force — had portrayed
protestors as terrorists and the gathering in Miami as a siege of the
city. Much of the money for militarizing Miami came, appropriately
enough, from an $8.5 million rider tacked onto the $87 million spending
bill for the war in Iraq. Miami will pay directly, however, both in
revenue lost from shutting the city down and, presumably, for
activists’ police brutality and civil-rights-violation lawsuits.

Perhaps the silliest example of the paranoiac reaction to the arrival
of protestors was the removal of all coconuts from downtown Miami palm
trees, lest activists throw them at the authorities — whether after first
shaking or scaling the trees was not made clear. Every outdoor trash
can had also apparently been removed from downtown; second-guessing
terrorists is an exercise whose creativity knows no bounds.

One of the most explicit ways the FTAA policing was modeled after “the
war on terror” abroad was the police decision to “embed” reporters.
While a number of reporters–looking dorky in their borrowed
helmets–joined the Miami cops, protestors invited the press to join the
other side as well, and many did. (Some got tear-gassed, and reported on
it.)

Many activists in the streets said that one of the functions of this
Miami police mobilization was to adjust the American public to the
militarization of public space and public life, to a
John-Ashcroft-style America. It may also have been an attempt to
condition police to functioning as a military force against the civil
society they’re supposed to serve. The city of Miami and a few nearby
communities passed emergency laws banning basic civil liberties such as
the right of assembly, laws that could easily be challenged — but not
before the FTAA was over. Activists were already talking about what
kind of police state will take hold of Manhattan during the Republican
Convention next year. And civil libertarians are taking note of the way
dissent of every kind is being reconfigured as terrorism.

The war of the possible worlds

Thursday, November 20, was like a day out of the science fiction movies
I grew up on, the ones where the world we know is in ruins and
guerrilla war rages in the rubble. Central Miami had been totally shut
down. Stores and offices were closed, nothing was being bought or sold,
no one was driving, the Metromover elevated rail system was locked up,
few went to work that day. The FTAA negotiators from the 34 nations of
the western hemisphere were sequestered in the tower of the
Intercontinental Hotel, and occasionally I’d see some of the hotel
people, tiny on the roof of that skyscraper, watching the turbulence
below. We must have looked like ants. Helicopters droned overhead,
reportedly using high-tech surveillance equipment to pinpoint activists
for arrest or assault by ground forces.

Thursday morning the city was abandoned but for those 2,500 cops and an
approximately equivalent number of activists. We’ve seen the world
Miami was that day in movies that range from The Terminator to Tank
Girl
to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Maybe the earliest and most somber
version can be found in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in which
humanity has diverged into two species: the bestial subterranean
Morlocks who prey on the pretty lamblike Eloi. We had moments of being
Tank Girl and moments of being lambs to the slaughter. Friday
afternoon, Eddie Yuen, who’s written about the antiglobalization
movement since Seattle, commented to me that at these antiglobalization
summits, “There are laboratories of dissent and laboratories of
repression, and right now the laboratories of repression are dominant.”

The police — except for a squadron of bare-kneed bicycle cops — were in
full riot gear: black helmets with visors, black body armor that
protected limbs, crotches and torso, combat boots. All seemed to carry
long wooden clubs and many had the rifles that fire “sublethal” rubber
bullets, beanbags and other projectiles capable of causing severe
injury — and even death. Four years before, in Seattle, I had seen the
dystopian future: it was a Darth Vader cop guarding the ruins of a
shattered Starbucks; now there were 2,500 of them and they weren’t
guarding, they were marching. As Starhawk commented, “It wasn’t the
worst I’ve ever seen, compared to Israel and Palestine, and Genoa
[where Italian police engaged in bloody assault and torture against
300,000 activists come to protest the G8 summit in the summer of 2001].
But there was a quality of sheer brute calculated fascism that’s hard
to equal.”

Some activists were picked off or hassled long before they got to the
site of the early-morning demonstration. More police were waiting for
us when we got there, ranks of cops, two or three thick, blocking off
streets, clubs clutched ready for action. Periodically they would move
in and herd us in yet another direction, and they never let us get near
the steel fence that steelworkers shouting against the FTAA had marched
past the afternoon before. Sometimes they would come out clubbing and
shooting. Local television claimed that activists threw smoke bombs at
the police, but what they videotaped was activists lobbing back the
tear-gas canisters that had been fired at us.

At midmorning, when it looked like they might surround us and engage in
wholesale arrests, I escorted a noncitizen out of the last possible
exit from the scene. Another member of our group, a professor with a
bandage around his head — he’d been clubbed from behind and bled
profusely — joined us, and we stayed on the sidelines until the
permitted march of perhaps 10,000 union members came by at noon on
its way through the abandoned city and then back to the safety zone
of a rented arena.

As the unions dispersed, the violence resurfaced. Puffs of tear-gas
rose up from the crowd in the distance. The helicopters roared
overhead, the only machine sound on that day when cars had been shut
out of the central city but for the occasional police vans and buses
bringing reinforcements or hauling away the arrested. What looked
like an amphibious tank rolled around in front of the steel fence.
Snatch squads moved into the crowd to seize individuals. A few vultures
had circled the skyscrapers in the morning, and by mid-afternoon there
must have been fifty of them, a flock of black carrion-eaters soaring
sometimes above, sometimes below the level of the helicopters.

The police rushed the crowd again, becoming so violent that the
activists splintered into small groups fleeing north into Overtown, an
African-American neighborhood of lush vacant lots, boarded-up
buildings, affable people out on the streets, and evident destitution.
Sirens screamed past us and small groups were pounced upon or hunted
further from downtown. My group was carrying a number of huge puppets
that had been used in the morning’s procession and, weary, we came to
stop under a row of street trees where we wouldn’t be so visible to the
helicopters hovering low for surveillance. Just this kind of hiding and
being hunted made it clear that what was going on was warfare of a
sort. This day, more than a hundred would be injured, twelve
hospitalized, and more than 200 arrested.

Later that night people would be pulled out of their cars at gunpoint
or stopped on the street for no particular reason — not just the young
but ministers, middle-aged NGO workers, anyone and everyone. And the
next day, more than fifty more activists were arrested in a peaceful
vigil outside the jail, where many of the previously arrested
languished. “They were surrounded by riot police and ordered to
disperse,” reported organizers. “As they did, police opened fire and
blocked the streets preventing many from leaving. We are now receiving
reports from people being released or calling from jail that there is
excessive brutality, sexual assault and torture going on inside.
People of color, queer and transgender prisoners are particularly being
targeted.” Sunday many of those arrested were released.

The visionary slogan of the antiglobalization movement is “Another
world is possible.” This time around some of the steelworkers had the
slogan emblazoned across the backs of their royal-blue union t-shirts.
What we don’t talk about so much is that many worlds are possible, and
some of them are hell.

Fragments

Seattle in 1999 has become a genesis story in which the revolution
began as Eden. There were tens of thousands of us blockading the WTO,
the story goes, and we were all as one: “turtles and teamsters,” is the
cliché. Actually, there were about fifty thousand in the big
labor-organized parade, and ten thousand or less — few union members
among them — shut down the streets around the WTO meeting on November 30,
1999. The various groups coexisted nicely but few articulated a
profound common ground for us all (though the globalization issue has
pushed activists from labor to the Sierra Club to develop a broader,
more encompassing analysis and to reach for broader coalitions).

After the Black Bloc of young anarchist activists first made its
presence known by smashing up the windows of Niketown, Starbucks
and a few other downtown Seattle corporate entities, some of those who
supported the blockade sparked internal squabbles when they decried the
property destruction. The Seattle police were brutal, attacking activists,
passersby, nearby neighborhoods, and even an older woman on the way to
her chemotherapy appointment. Seattle was no Eden but a miracle all the
same, and a huge surprise for the world — both that direct action could be
so effective and that globalization was not going to go forward unimpeded.
Four years later the tank of corporate capitalism that seemed to be
inexorably advancing on the world is idling its engines or going in
circles, and it could yet end up in a ditch.

Cancun was another miracle, notable for the fluid circulation of
passion and politics between the developing nations that stood up to
the United States and the European Union, the NGO activists who were
both inside at the Ministerial and outside in the streets, and the
street activists, who included Yucatan and Korean farmers and a fair
representation of the rest of the world from Canada to Africa. As in
Seattle, the activists stiffened the resolve of the poor nations, and
the poor nations stood up for themselves against the agendas of the
rich ones.

The street activists in Miami were overwhelmingly white Americans, and
there was no such porousness: the Intercontinental Hotel was for all
intents and purposes hermetically sealed. NGOs had no role in the FTAA
talks or even access to the hotel. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney
went to visit the Convergence Center, the warehouse north of downtown
where the direct action was organized and decried the police violence
(which never targeted the union people). But the protests felt
fragmentary: beforehand, the direct action contingent had had to
negotiate long and hard even to get the unions to consent to letting
them–as if they owned the day–demonstrate on the same day. Though we
joined the labor march, they didn’t join us, and the teach-ins held at
the Doubletree Hotel and other venues around town seemed to separate
out more circumspect activists from the stuff in the street.

Uprisings, protest, civil disobedience–the stuff in the street–still
matter, even though they don’t change the world every time. Sometimes
it’s just an exercise of democracy and bravado, exercise in the sense
of maintaining the strength and ability to intervene at a time when it
will count. A month ago, Bolivians in the streets and roads of their
own nation forced the resignation of their millionaire president, who
was trying to export the impoverished nation’s resources. An insurgent
spirit and direct action are radicalizing Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil,
Ecuador, and Venezuela. The surprise in Miami isn’t that so little was
agreed to but, with the revolt against neoliberalism well underway in
South America, that anything was.

Rebecca Solnit’s most recent book is River of Shadows: Eadweard
Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
, though her 1994 Savage
Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
has the
most civil disobedience in it.

Copyright C2003 Rebecca Solnit